INVESTIGATIONS ON THE GLOBAL IMAGE DATASETS FOR THE ABSOLUTE GEOMETRIC QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF MSG SEVIRI IMAGERY

Abstract. EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1986, supplies weather and climate-related satellite data, images and products throughout the year for EU Member States and other users worldwide. The optical Earth Observation satellites launched and operated by EUMETSAT, both current and planned ones, have different spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions; sensor models and acquisition geometries. While the number and the diversity of the satellite missions increase, the requirement of novel methods and up-to-date reference data for geometric accuracy assessment of the imagery also grows. This paper aims at reporting the results of a study investigating the availability for suitable satellite imagery to be employed as reference data for the geometric quality assessment (GQA) of MSG SEVIRI Level 1.5 image products. The reference datasets need to have superior spatial resolution, wide global coverage, and spectral compatibility with respect to the SEVIRI sensor, which has 12 spectral bands with 1 km and 3 km spatial resolutions. The SEVIRI sensor works with whiskbroom principle at a geostationary orbit and collects data at 5 minutes (rapid scan) and 15-minutes (full scan) intervals. Although preliminary investigations on reference data were performed by using images of different satellite sensors during the study, in-depth investigations were performed with MERIS global image mosaic and Landsat imagery. The progress and different problems observed in the images are reported here.