Identifying Clouds over the Pierre Auger Observatory using Infrared Satellite Data

Understand

We describe a new method of identifying night-time clouds over the Pierre Auger Observatory using infrared data from the Imager instruments on the GOES-12 and GOES-13 satellites.

• We compare cloud identifications resulting from our method to those obtained by the Central Laser Facility of the Auger Observatory.
• Using our new method we can now develop cloud probability maps for the 3000 km^2 of the Pierre Auger Observatory twice per hour with a spatial resolution of ~2.4 km by ~5.5 km.
• Our method could also be applied to monitor cloud cover for other ground-based observatories and for space-based observatories.