Advances in Geostationary-Derived Longwave Fluxes for the CERES Synoptic (SYN1deg) Product

The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project has provided the climate community 15 years of globally observed top-of-the-atmosphere fluxes critical for climate and cloud feedback studies. To accurately monitor the earth’s radiation budget, the CERES instrument footprint fluxes mu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of atmospheric and oceanic technology Vol. 33; no. 3; pp. 503 - 521
Main Authors: Doelling, David R., Sun, Moguo, Nguyen, Le Trang, Nordeen, Michele L., Haney, Conor O., Keyes, Dennis F., Mlynczak, Pamela E.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Boston American Meteorological Society 01.03.2016
Subjects:
Algorithms
Atmospherics
Calibration
Channels
Climate
Climatic data
Cloud properties
Clouds
Data processing
Direct conversion
Fluxes
Geostationary satellites
Marine
Meteorological satellites
Narrowband
Radiance
Radiation
Radiation budget
Relative humidity
Reprocessing
Synchronous satellites
Trends
Water vapor
Water vapour
ISSN:0739-0572, 1520-0426
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project has provided the climate community 15 years of globally observed top-of-the-atmosphere fluxes critical for climate and cloud feedback studies. To accurately monitor the earth’s radiation budget, the CERES instrument footprint fluxes must be spatially and temporally averaged properly. The CERES synoptic 1° (SYN1deg) product incorporates derived fluxes from the geostationary satellites (GEOs) to account for the regional diurnal flux variations in between Terra and Aqua CERES measurements. The Edition 4 CERES reprocessing effort has provided the opportunity to reevaluate the derivation of longwave (LW) fluxes from GEO narrowband radiances by examining the improvements from incorporating 1-hourly versus 3-hourly GEO data, additional GEO infrared (IR) channels, and multichannel GEO cloud properties. The resultant GEO LW fluxes need to be consistent across the 16-satellite climate data record. To that end, the addition of the water vapor channel, available on all GEOs, was more effective than using a reanalysis dataset’s column-weighted relative humidity combined with the window channel radiance. The benefit of the CERES LW angular directional model to derive fluxes was limited by the inconsistency of the GEO cloud retrievals. Greater success was found in the direct conversion of window and water vapor channel radiances into fluxes. Incorporating 1-hourly GEO fluxes had the greatest impact on improving the accuracy of high-temporal-resolution fluxes, and normalizing the GEO LW fluxes with CERES greatly reduced the monthly regional LW flux bias.
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ISSN:0739-0572
1520-0426
DOI:10.1175/JTECH-D-15-0147.1