Techniques for using small parallax angles in remote sensing to determine cloud feature height include exploiting two identical medium-resolution SWIR bands with parallax to estimate cloud edge feature heights well enough to enable assessments of the impacts of shadows and proximate cloud scattering on ground illumination, and hence, on reflectance calculations. The bands are intentionally designed to have a suitable parallax angle, in one embodiment approximately 1.5 degrees. With this parallax, one band will see more ground pixels than the other band as they encounter a leading edge of a cloud and the other band will see more ground pixels than the one band as they encounter the lagging edge of the cloud. From these numbers of pixels, the height of the leading and lagging edges of the cloud can be determined.