Simulating Nighttime Visible Satellite Imagery of Tropical Cyclones Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Visible (VIS) imagery is important for monitoring tropical cyclones (TCs) but is unavailable at night. This study presents a conditional generative adversarial networks model to generate nighttime VIS imagery with significantly enhanced accuracy and spatial resolution. Our method offers three key improvements compared to existing models. First, we replaced the L1 loss in the pix2pix framework with the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) loss, which significantly reduced image blurriness. Second, we selected multispectral infrared bands as input based on a thorough examination of their spectral properties, providing essential physical information for accurate simulation. Third, we incorporated the direction parameters of the sun and the satellite, which addressed the dependence of VIS images on sunlight directions and enabled a much larger training set from continuous daytime data. The model was trained and validated using data from the advanced Himawari imager in the daytime, achieving statistical results of SSIM = 0.923 and root mean square error = 0.0299, which significantly surpasses existing models. We also performed a cross-satellite nighttime model validation using the day/night band of the visible/infrared imager radiometer suite, which yields outstanding results compared to existing models. Our model is operationally applied to generate accurate VIS imagery with arbitrary virtual sunlight directions, significantly contributing to the nighttime monitoring of various meteorological phenomena.