Cloud Identification and Properties Retrieval of the Fengyun-4A Satellite Using a ResUnet Model

The Advanced Geostationary Radiation Imager (AGRI) onboard the Fengyun-4A (FY4A) satellite has good cloud observation ability, but it still absents all-weather and high-precision official cloud products. This study develops a deep-learning ResUnet model for all-weather retrieval of cloud phase (CLP) and cloud properties using the brightness temperature from water vapor and longwave infrared channels of AGRI. The ResUnet model is trained with the Himawari-8 satellite Level-2 (H8-L2) cloud products as true targets, and adopts image-by-image way to learn the spatial structure information of clouds, which compensates for the difficulty of retrieving thick clouds by thermal infrared radiation at night to some extent. On an independent testing dataset, the model has an overall accuracy of 90.64% for CLP identification and performs well at retrieving cloud top height (CTH). Even without using visible and near-infrared radiation, the root mean square error of cloud effective radius (CER) and cloud optical thickness (COT) estimations still reaches 7.14 μm and 9.01 in the range of 0–60. To further illustrate the reliability and applicability, CLP and cloud properties provided by the CALIPSO and MODIS are used as benchmarks to assess the quality of cloud products from FY4A satellite Level-2 (FY4A-L2), H8-L2 and ResUnet model retrieval. The ResUnet model provides a significant improvement over FY4A-L2 for the accuracy of cloud identification and in the quality of CTH products. In the range of 0–40 μm (0–60), the CER (COT) product of ResUnet model retrieval has a reliable and higher precision that is comparable with H8-L2.