Ebook: Average Cloudiness in the Tropics from Satellite Observations

Since January, 1965, weather satellites have made pictures at least once a day of the whole earth. Although at first the information was used primarily to help day-to-day weather forecasting, enough data has now accumulated for scientists to begin climatological studies in a new and serious way.

This monograph reports a pioneering attempt to describe and partly to account for the distribution of average cloudiness for each month from February, 1965, through January, 1967. The work, at first fancied to the Indian Ocean Tropics, was expanded to encompass the whole tropical zone between 30N and 30S. Hand averaging is being continued at the University of Hawaii beyond January 1967 in the expectation that computers will eventually take over the job.