Whole Sky Imaging of Clouds in the Visible and IR for Starfire Optical Range

Book excerpt: This report describes the work done for the Starfire Optical Range, Kirtland Air Force Base under Contract N00014-01-D-043 DO #11, between 02 September 2004 and 30 April 2006. This work relates to the Air Force's need to characterize the cloud distribution during day and night, for a variety of applications, including support of research into impact of clouds on laser communication and support of satellite tracking. This contract followed Contract N00014-01-D-0043 DO #4, which will be discussed in Section 2, and is documented in Shields et al 2007, Technical Note 271. Under this contract, we began preparing Whole Sky Imager systems for field experiments in support of program goals, adapting the software and refurbishing the hardware. Significant progress was made both in the related cloud algorithms and in methods to assess their accuracy. A related contract was funded through Boeing during 31 January 2005 - 30 November 2005. The tasks completed under that contract are closely related to these tasks, and will also be reported here. In particular, early portions of the night algorithm work reported in Section 7, and early portions of the hardware and software refurbishment were completed partly under the ONR contract and partly under the Boeing contract. The work under this Boeing contract was finished in May 2005. A follow-on contract, ONR N00014-0l-D-0043 DO #13 was funded on 20 April 2006. The work under DO #13 will be reported under a separate report upon completion of the contract.