I'm looking for data on cloud cover (e.g. in % or optical thickness) and cloud height at (at least) 3-hourly intervals, so including nighttime. Gridded data (e.g. on 1x1 degree) would be easiest to handle, and I'd be very happy if the algorithm is documented somewhere.
As far as I know, GOES-West is the only geo-stationary instrument covering this region, is that right?
Hello Marloes.
The first source that comes to my mind is that of Patrick Minnis of NASA Langley: http://www-pm.larc.nasa.gov
NOAA has a nice site as well: http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/atmosphere/clouds.html
The Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) of the Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, is another site to visit: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/
I can also add the web site of the GEWEX GDAP Cloud Assessment exercise and I believe it could help you somehow at least to give you an idea: http://climserv.ipsl.polytechnique.fr/gewexca/
Moreover, a very famous and controlled dataset is the one from the International Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), but it is more coarse: http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/
Hope it helps!
You may also want to check out NASA's Earth Science Database. Link attached. Just search with the keyword 'Cloud' and you will find a number of options.
https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search?q=cloud
James and Vincenzo, thanks a lot for your suggestions! I had found most of the links myself but had run into the problem that whereas image files (mostly .gif) are freely available from many data centers, data sets are harder to get. On Patrick Minnis' site I found a link to gridded NetCDF files (which is exactly what I need), but only the only data online are from 2016. I tried to contact him, but received no reply.
I tried the ISCCP data, because that looks very promising, but ran into trouble with the data format. The site offers some tools that I will try to use, but if there is an easier way of getting the data in a format that I can read (hdf, hdf5, netcdf) I'd be glad to know.
Best,
Marloes
Update: I contacted Louis Nguyen and Thad Chee (both NASA) and they promptly sent me all GOES cloud data I need (8 months of data gridded on 1x1 degree resolution) in netcdf format. Thanks, people!
And another tip for those people in search of GOES level-2 data:
https://reverb.echo.nasa.gov/reverb/
and look for CER_GEO data
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