An analysis of Earth's radiation variability from CERES FLASHFlux and CERES EBAF data

The Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) Fast Longwave And SHortwave Radiative Fluxes (FLASHFlux) data products were introduced at the NASA Langley Research Center to address the needs of the science community for global surface and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes on a near real-time basis. This has been accomplished by enhancing the speed of CERES processing using simplified calibration and averaging techniques and fast radiation parameterizations to produce fluxes within a week of real-time. While the resulting products are not considered to be sufficiently accurate for studying long-term climate trends, they satisfy the needs for many near real-time scientific data analyses and industrial applications.

One of the uses of FLASHFlux data is for the evaluation of flux variability and extremes relative to climatological means. Normalizing FLASHFlux TOA fluxes with CERES Energy Balance And Filled (EBAF) TOA fluxes on a global scale, we are able to provide one-year flux change and flux anomalies relative to the EBAF TOA climatology for the State of the Climate report. In this presentation, we extend our analysis to assess the seasonal variability and extremes for the year 2013 on a 1-degree regional scale. We also highlight the differences between FLASHFlux surface model compare to the EBAF surface model and assess the feasibility of normalizing the FLASHFLux surface model to EBAF surface model on a regional scale.