CERES footprint as a base for multi-sensor satellite data fusion and radiative transfer calculations

The CERES broadband radiance footprint has been used to convolve radiances, cloud derived by the CERES cloud algorithm and aerosol properties derived by the MODIS aerosol algorithm from the collocated MODIS radiances in the Single Scanner Footprint data product. It is an instantaneous level 2 product used in the long-term Earth Radiation Budget records for Terra and Aqua satellite of the Earth Observing System program. With the addition of CALIPSO and CloudSat to the A-Train constellation, vertical structure of clouds and aerosol properties have been included into the CERES footprint over the CALIPSO and CloudSat ground track. CALIPSO and CloudSat provide detailed information of vertical structure of clouds and aerosols. The resulting vertical distribution is used as input to the radiative transfer code to produce vertical radiative flux and heating rate profiles with 120-meter resolution near the surface. The resulting fluxes can then be compared with the CERES derived top-of-atmosphere (TOA) flux for a consistency check of modeled TOA radiative flux. The data product including CALIOP and CloudSat derived cloud and aerosol properties, CERES derived TOA and modeled vertical profiles of radaitive fluxes is available for process studies. The inclusion of cloud and aerosol information from various sources in one product allows easy validation between them. Over a year's worth of data is available in the CCCM data product. In this presentation, the algorithm for merging data taken from multiple satellite instruments is discussed. In addition, how CALIPSO and CloudSat derived cloud and aerosol properties improve radiative flux computations from those using only MODIS derived properties are discussed.