ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Remote Sens.
Sec. Atmospheric Remote Sensing
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsen.2025.1632157
This article is part of the Research TopicEarth Observations from the Deep Space: 10 Years of the DSCOVR MissionView all articles
Decadal Observations of Global Daytime Cloud Properties from DSCOVR-EPIC
Provisionally accepted
- 1National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Washington D.C., United States
- 2Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
- 3University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
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This study presents a decadal analysis of global daytime cloud properties using observations from the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) aboard the DSCOVR satellite from July 2015 to December 2024. We focus on cloud fraction and cloud effective height (CEH) from the EPIC standard Level 2 cloud products. Consistent with other satellite observations, the EPIC-derived decadal global cloud fraction shows high cloudiness over tropical convergence zones and midlatitude storm tracks, and reduced cloud cover over subtropical regions associated with the descending branches of the Hadley circulation. Seasonal analysis shows greater variability over land, while cloud fraction remains consistently higher over oceans. Trend analysis using the Mann-Kendall and Theil-Sen methods identifies a statistically significant decreasing trend in cloud fraction over land (-0.0329 per decade, p = 0.014), primarily confined to the Northern Hemisphere. No significant trend is found over ocean or in CEH. Spatial trend maps highlight regional cloud fraction decreases over the western tropical Pacific and central Africa, and increases over parts of the midlatitude oceans. These results demonstrate EPIC's capability in tracking global and regional cloud variability and contribute to our understanding of cloud-climate interactions.
Keywords: global, Cloud coverage, Cloud height, daytime, epic, DSCOVR
Received: 20 May 2025; Accepted: 14 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yang, Bhatta and Delgado Bonal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuekui Yang, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Washington D.C., United States
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