Single Scanner Footprint Fluxes from CERES and FLASHFlux

A considerable level of careful processing is necessary to achieve the exceptional quality required of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy Systems (CERES) data products. Obtaining such high quality, however, causes delays of six months or more in the release of CERES data beyond the acquisition of the initial measurements. Since there are a significant number of near real-time uses for the CERES data products, the Fast Longwave and Shortwave Radiative Flux (FLASHFlux) project was created to provide CERES-like data products to the data analysis community within a week of the initial measurements by exchanging some degree of accuracy for speed. During the development of the FLASHFlux project, we were able to achieve not only the one-week processing objective but also to demonstrate the capability of FLASHFlux to provide data products that are in remarkably good agreement with the CERES data products for the instantaneous single scanner footprint (SSF) fluxes. This work describes the methods used to expedite the production of the SSF fluxes through the assimilation of CERES data, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data and other meteorological data, as well as the efforts to validate the SSF fluxes against ground-truth measurements and CERES results.