Patent ID: 8184865

Claim:
A land-surface image data producing method that is performed after a production standard date is set, the method comprising, successively: referring to an image database that is stored while imaging date and time data is correlated with geostationary satellite image data and obtaining a predetermined region of the geostationary satellite image data at a predetermined time in the production standard date as standard image data; comparing a pixel value and a predetermined threshold to determine whether each pixel of the standard image data reflects a land surface or a cloud, extracting a pixel that is determined to be the pixel reflecting the land surface and storing the pixel as partial image data, and setting a region on the standard image data specified by remaining pixels as a missing region; referring to the image database to obtain image data as reference image data, the image data corresponding to the missing region in geostationary satellite image data of another imaging date and time, which is determined to be geostationary satellite image data having a close temporal relevance in a relationship between a solar position and the predetermined time at the production standard date according to a predetermined criterion, comparing a pixel value of each pixel of the reference image data to a predetermined threshold, determining whether the pixel value reflects the land surface or the cloud, repeating the processing by sequentially adding the another imaging date and time according to a predetermined priority until the missing region is filled up with the pixel determined to be the pixel reflecting the land surface, and producing interpolated image data that is formed by filling up the missing region with the pixel determined to be the pixel reflecting the land surface; and synthesizing the partial image data and the interpolated image data to produce land-surface image data.