Investigating the Satellite Resolution Required for Confident Coverage of Earth's Surface Radiation Measurements

Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) ground data stations around the United States are far and few in between, yet they hope to capture and represent the solar radiation measurements covering approximately 3.8 million square miles. Creating a continuous, accurate, and up-to-date coverage of the entire US requires satellite data (via NASA's POWER Project) be collected, processed, and validated against the 13 sporadically-located active BSRN stations. Regions that can't be validated against ground data values can be reasonably interpolated once a validation system has been created. Accordingly, as many of these BSRN stations are in remote areas due to space and resource constraints, the majority of interpolations are performed upon regions that have denser communities. This raises the question of if the satellite data resolution is high enough such that these interpolations capture specific community-related variances and how these interpolations can be refined. This paper analyzes what variances are captured via the current resolution of NASA's satellites and data processed by the POWER Project, and verifies if the interpolated values are of a high enough resolution such that communities can reliably make decisions from the satellite-derived information of the Earth's surface.