10-Years of Aqua and Terra MODIS and Regional Cloud Amounts

Significant effort has been given to generating climate quality long-term cloud data sets using Aqua MODIS instruments, with plans to continue the cloud record using the next generation of polar orbiting sensors. A "Climate Quality" climatology requires that both the uncertainties and the physical sensitivities are quantified and are smaller than the expected climate signature. For this purpose we created a high spatial resolution Level-3 data. The attached figure shows the seasonal mean cloud amounts over the state of Wisconsin at a nearly a 1 km resolution. Understanding regional distributions is important in climate studies, and the spatial scale of MODIS and its averaging scheme enables us to explore changes in cloud cover at the local scale. The presentation will describe the variation of cloud cover on the regional scale over the Great Lakes region. We'll explore the spatial and temporal distributions for the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest of the United States. Examining trends, regional variations and correlations with the AVHRR and MODIS Terra satellite cloud record, as well as the MODIS Terra data set. We present seasonal variations over each lake as well as surrounding land. We will summarize what we learned about regional cloud covers from this 10-year MODIS data set.