TSILA A.YU., SHPYG V.M. RESEARCHES ON CLOUDINESS IN UKRAINE AND ABROAD
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/2306-5680.2025.4.6
Hydrology, Hydrochemistry and Hydroecology. 2025. № 4(78)
Publication language: Ukrainian
Authors:
Tsila A.Yu., Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Shpyg V.M., Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Cloud cover is one of the key components of the climate system and significantly affects the Earth’s radiation balance, atmospheric circulation and precipitation, and these reasons making it one of the main climate indicators. This article is devoted to the analysis of Ukrainian and foreign studies of cloud cover in the context of climatology, the main directions and data sources used for investigations.
In Ukraine the studies devoted to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative changes of cloud cover in the 20th and 21st centuries are not widespread. The most widely and meaningfully represented issues are the degree of cloudiness coverage, the annual course of total and low cloud cover, the contribution of low cloud cover to the total, the recurrence and annual course of cloudy sky, the daily course of total cloud cover, the stability of clear and cloudy weather, the cloudiness regime by its form and height, and the spatial structure of clouds. There are also studies that, in the context of climate change, reveal issues regarding changes in the repeatability of clouds of the main forms and the relationship of cloud cover with atmospheric circulation (by analyzing the baric field and atmospheric circulation indices). All of them are based on ground-based observation data, while often the number of meteorological stations and the length of the series (study periods) used are different. It is also worth noting the presence of a small number of studies devoted to the temperature regime in clouds and the surrounding cloud space, the phase state and water content of clouds over Ukraine. These studies were conducted on the basis of archive data from aircraft soundings conducted during the second half of the 20th century.
Cloud studies conducted abroad are also often based on ground-based observation data, but several obvious trends are worth noting. The appearance of remote sensing tools for determining the physical and geometric characteristics of clouds has made it possible to study their climatology. Initially, these were studies based on meteorological radar data. Later the use of meteorological satellite data became widespread. The rapid development of high-performance computing technology has become one of the factors for the significant progress of numerical atmospheric modeling. Since the late 20th and early 21st centuries and up to the present, the process of widespread use of atmospheric models for modeling the climate of the past and future continues. Their spatial resolution is increasing: there is a division into global and regional models. Relatively recently, a separate class of such models has appeared, which has been called “reanalysis”. The most famous in the world at the moment are reanalyses which were developed by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the National Center for Environmental Prediction (the USA) and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). Over the past two decades, the use of reanalysis in combination with other data sources has become the most widespread in the world.
Generalization of the results obtained by various authors (both Ukrainian and foreign) makes it possible to conclude the following: 1) changes in cloud cover are regional in nature (are not the same across the territory); 2) changes in cloud cover against the background of the general trend have certain oscillations (tendencies to increase and decrease during internal time periods), which is obviously related to atmospheric circulation; 3) an increase or decrease in cloud cover occurs mainly due to a change in the number of separate cloud forms that are characteristic of a given territory (in a rougher approximation – through the redistribution of the amount of convective and stratiform clouds).
Key words: cloudiness; meteorological satellite; meteorological radar; numerical atmospheric model; reanalysis; climatology.
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HOW TO CITE
Tsila, A.Yu., Shpyg, V.M. (2025). Researches on cloudiness in Ukraine and abroad. Hidrolohiia, hidrokhimiia i hidroekolohiia [Hydrology, Hydrochemistry and Hydroecology], 4(78), 67-79 (in Ukrainian, abstr. in English). https://doi.org/10.17721/2306-5680.2025.4.6