| dc.description.abstract | The study aimed at improving the estimation of cloudiness over East
Africa through establishment of the relationship between observed
cloud cover and the satellite derived reflectivity. Two types of data
were used, namely: remotely sensed data and the ground cloud observation
for the stations over the selected area of East African region
covering from 0.11oN to 5.47oS and 32.33oE to 39.15oE. The
stations considered were Nairobi and Mombasa for Kenya, Dar-es-
Salaam and Kilimanjaro for Tanzania, and Kampala, Makerere and
Kasese for Uganda. The remotely sensed data were obtained from
one channel of the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrum (TOMS) satellite.
Correlation analysis indicated that there is a significant relationship
between ground-based cloud cover and satellite-derived reflectivity.
The relationship seemed to be influenced by the prevailing mesoscale
features prevalent in the specific areas. Based on these correlation
analysis results, it may be concluded that satellite-derived reflectivity
can represent the observed cloud cover, and consequently
models can be designed to estimate the in-situ cloud observations
over areas lacking ground-based cloud observations. | en |
