Tuesday, 4 June 2002
Conversion of Narrowband Visible Radiances to Broadband Shortwave Radiances Using Coincident CERES and VIRS data
Monitoring of regional radiation budgets is limited by the availability of broadband measurement
systems like the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) and the recent Clouds and the
Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) and by the accuracy of the broadband fluxes derived
from narrowband imagers on sun-synchronous and geostationary satellites. Incorporation of
operational satellites would greatly reduce errors due to temporal sampling. Narrowband to
broadband conversions that do not involve computer intensive radiative transfer models or those
that do not require large apriori data set would be ideal. The narrowband to broadband models
currently used in the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program geostationary
products involve narrowband-to-broadband shortwave (SW) albedo conversions. These
conversions are sensitive to the biases in the anisotropic models and are not dependent on cloud
properties. The direct narrowband to broadband albedo conversion formulas include a solar
zenith angle term but have a 10% relative RMS error. The considerable error in this approach
results from its lack of terms accounting for cloud properties and vegetation changes and from
inaccurate anisotropic models. The CERES Single Scanner Footprint TOA/Surface and Clouds
(SSF) dataset provides coincident, collocated and co-angled SW and visible data at a nominal
10-km footprint. The dataset is limited to a 45° viewing zenith angle because of the Visible
Infrared Scanner (VIRS) instrument and to data equatorward of 40° latitude because of the
Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite orbit. This paper uses the CERES
TRMM dataset and some preliminary CERES SSF data from the Terra satellite to derive
improved narrow-to-broadband radiance models. The conversions are modeled as functions of
angles, geotype, cloud optical depth and phase. These models can then be applied to pixel level
imager satellites to compute more accurate high resolution broadband SW fluxes from VIS
radiances.
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