Consistency of surface anisotropy characterization with meteosat observations

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the evaluation of the Meteosat Surface Albedo (MSA) product, including the effects due to instrument changes and associated calibration uncertainties. To this end, observations acquired by two adjacent geostationary spacecrafts, Meteosat-7 and Meteosat-5 have been processed with the MSA algorithm. These satellites are located, respectively, at 0° and 63° East. Data acquired by these two instruments overlap over a large area encompassing most of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The consistency of the surface anisotropy retrieval is evaluated through a reconstruction of the Meteosat-5 (-7) observations with the Meteosat-7 (-5) surface anisotropy characterization. Some differences slightly higher than the calibration accuracy have been found. This effect has no significant impact on the albedo retrieval which indicates that MSA is a reliable algorithm to produce albedo datasets.