Automated Visibility and Cloud Cover Measurements with a Solid State Imaging System.

摘要

This Final Report, under Contract No. F19628-84-K-0047, summarizes the development status of two computer-controlled, video-based imaging systems, their initial deployment and the preliminary application of their output data for the objective determination of cloud free paths of sight, total cloud cover, and sector visibilities. The research supporting these tasks has been a multi-year activity conducted at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography under the sponsorship of the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory. The effort has been directed toward the development of two related systems, one for the automatic assessment of total cloud cover and its related distributional statistics, and the other for the automatic determination of local sector visibilities. Both systems involve the use of similar hardware for image acquisition and manipulation, but quite different analytics and control algorithms, thus they are discussed separately in this Final Report. The development status at the conclusion of this contract interval is such that two prototype systems, the Whole Sky Imager which is used for cloud cover assessments and the Automatic Horizon Scanner which is used for visibility determinations, are built, operational in several locations, and are producing image oriented data bases appropriate for computer analysis. Preliminary analytic algorithms for the use of these data in automated processes have been developed and are undergoing refinement. (RRH)