ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Remote Sens.
Sec. Atmospheric Remote Sensing
This article is part of the Research TopicEarth Observations from the Deep Space: 10 Years of the DSCOVR MissionView all 18 articles
Statistics of glinting clouds observed by DSCOVR and geostationary satellites
Provisionally accepted
- 1Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, United States
- 2NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, United States
- 3Michigan Technological University, Houghton, United States
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This study examines how frequently the specular reflection of sunlight—that is, sun glint— reveals the presence of ice crystals that maintain a steady horizontal orientation. The study analyzes data from the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft and from collocated images taken by geostationary satellites. The analysis of spatio-temporal variations in glint frequency over vegetated land surfaces reveals that (a) year-to-year variations are modest with no clear trends; (b) glints typically occur 7-8% more frequently than previously estimated; (c) glints are most frequently observed during the May-August period, and over Asia. The results also show that glint frequency drops for very high (>12-13 km) clouds but otherwise displays little sensitivity to geostationary satellite-provided cloud parameters, namely altitude, optical thickness, and particle size. This is because glints come from horizontal crystals near cloud tops whereas geostationary satellites characterize the entire cloudy column. This suggests that glint-free passive satellite observations are not well-suited for estimating the likelihood of horizontal ice crystals and underlines the importance of analyzing direct sun glint observations from satellite instruments such as EPIC.
Keywords: cloud, DSCOVR, epic, Glint, Ice crystals
Received: 01 Sep 2025; Accepted: 11 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Várnai, Marshak and Alex. 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: Tamás Várnai
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