Satellite temperature measurement

Wildfires, volcanos, and industrial hot spots can also be found via thermal imaging from weather satellites.

Satellites measure radiances in various wavelength bands, which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature.

[3][4][5] Particularly large differences between reconstructed temperature series occur at the few times when there is little temporal overlap between successive satellites, making intercalibration difficult.

Satellites used to retrieve surface temperatures via measurement of thermal infrared in general require cloud-free conditions.

[9] Weather satellites have been available to infer sea surface temperature (SST) information since 1967, with the first global composites occurring during 1970.

[10] Since 1982,[11] satellites have been increasingly utilized to measure SST and have allowed its spatial and temporal variation to be viewed more fully.

[16] Using the Dvorak technique, infrared satellite imagery can be used to determine the temperature difference between the eye and the cloud top temperature of the central dense overcast of mature tropical cyclones to estimate their maximum sustained winds and their minimum central pressures.

[17] Along Track Scanning Radiometers aboard weather satellites are able to detect wildfires, which show up at night as pixels with a greater temperature than 308 K (35 °C; 95 °F).

The SSU is a far-infrared spectrometer employing a pressure modulation technique to make measurement in three channels in the 15 μm carbon dioxide absorption band.

The greatest cooling occurred in the tropical stratosphere consistent with enhanced Brewer-Dobson circulation under greenhouse gas concentrations increase.

[26] The long term cooling in the lower stratosphere occurred in two downward steps in temperature both after the transient warming related to explosive volcanic eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo, this behavior of the global stratospheric temperature has been attributed to global ozone concentration variation in the two years following volcanic eruptions.