Improved Image Aggregation for Large-Scale Cloud-Free Image Creation

There are many extant approaches for removing clouds from satellite imagery, but they all have significant down-sides, particularly in conducting analysis on a short time series. Schmitt et al. innovated an approach within Google Earth Engine that solves many of those issues, but it contains limitations of its own, specifically in dealing with large regions, determining which date range to draw images from, and its propensity to output hazy or overly-exposed results. In this paper we address these limitations of the Schmitt et al. method and demonstrate how we solved them, both improving upon the algorithm and making it more applicable to a wider variety of use cases.