Open AccessTHE CLIMATE OF THE CANARY ISLANDS BY ANNUAL CYCLE PARAMETERS
Author(s) -
Benjamin Bechtel
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the international archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences/international archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.264
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1682-1777
pISSN - 1682-1750
DOI - 10.5194/isprsarchives-xli-b8-243-2016
Subject(s) - climatology , orography , environmental science , precipitation , annual cycle , climate model , subsidence , archipelago , climate change , geography , geology , meteorology , oceanography , paleontology , structural basin
Annual cycle parameters (ACP) provide a global climatology of annual land surface temperature (LST) based on daily 1 km MODIS observations. These are based on a simple model of the annual temperature cycle and allow estimating LST patterns under largely cloud-free conditions for every day of year. Further, they deliver measures for the LST variability and the frequency of cloud occurrence. It has been demonstrated, that they reproduce important surface climate characteristics at global and urban scale but their ability to reproduce topo-climates has yet to be studied in detail. In this paper their suitability to investigate climatic variability at km scale were studied at the case of the Canary Islands (Spain). This Archipelago, has a very stable climate dominated by the Azores high and the trade wind belt, but shows a large number of micro-climates ranging from arid hot climates to cold climates. It was found that ACPs are a relevant source of climatic information at km scale in complex orography. Specifically, known features such as subsidence inversion, the resulting sea of clouds, the strong differentiation in precipitation between the flat and high islands, as well as the northern and southern slopes at the latter were clearly visible in the parameters.