A note on first estimates of surface insolation from GOES-8 visible satellite data

Abstract

Visible imagery from geostationary satellites have a long history of providing accurate estimates of surface insolation over large spatial domains and at high horizontal resolution. In 1995, the United States launched its second generation of these geostationary (GOES) satellites, GOES-8 and GOES-9, with somewhat different visible sensor characteristics than their predecessors (GOES 1-7). In this work, we discuss first results of the estimation of daily insolation from these new data and compare the results to a pyranometer network maintained in Wisconsin by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These results appear to be good and will be applied to estimating potential evapotranspiration for areas in Wisconsin where such knowledge of surface insolation is of primary importance for the scheduling of irrigation.