Tuesday, 4 June 2002
Development of Correction Factors to Derive a Global Radiation Budget from Triana Data
The Triana mission provides a unique approach to monitoring the Earth's radiation budget.
Triana will be the first Earth-observing platform in the Lagrange position (L1) and will always
view the sunlit side of the planet. This view eliminates the need for temporal corrections to
derive the daytime global radiation budget. However, it does not view the dark side of the globe.
The Triana satellite carries the Scripps-NISTAR (National Institute of Standards and Technology
Absolute Radiometer), which will measure global broadband shortwave (SW) and longwave
(LW) radiances every few minutes. The measured radiances must be converted to fluxes to
obtain the radiation budget. A small sunlit sliver of the Earth’s disc will not be in the Triana view
because of its Lissajous orbit about the L1 position. Global correction factors are needed to
account for the anisotropy of the radiances and the unviewed part of the planet. These global
correction factors depend on the diurnal and seasonal cycles as well as orbit position. With the
aid of reliable correction factors, Triana should provide the most accurate global radiation budget
to date complementing higher resolution measurements like higher resolution data from the
Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System Project. To derive these factors, it is necessary to
realistically simulate the viewed scenes. The Triana radiometer data are simulated using Earth
Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) data for the 1985-1989 time period. Instantaneous
regional ERBE broadband fluxes are interpolated regionally and temporally with enhancements
based on 3-hourly International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) geostationary and
Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) narrowband radiances. The narrowband
radiances are converted to broadband fluxes and then normalized to the ERBE data. The
interpolation yields hourly global GMT (synoptic) SW and LW radiances that are converted to
fluxes using state-of-the art anisotropic models. These regional radiances are then integrated to
produce the single global radiance for any Triana position. Correction factors are computed and
evaluated diurnally, seasonally, and interannually. The factors are parameterized using Fourier
analysis and cloud information based on the narrowband data. The Triana satellite has the
Scripps-EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) for deriving cloud properties. An error
analysis of the global correction factors is presented.
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