The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment included a non-scanning radiometer aboard the NOAA 7 spacecraft, which flew in 1985 and operated to provide global coverage of radiation budget measurements until 1992. Because of the geometry of the Sun-synchronous orbit and the resulting pattern of insolation on the quartz dome of the shortwave channel, the dome transmission degraded with a non-uniform pattern, thus affecting the calibration and the measurements of shortwave irradiance at the instrument, and subsequently both the shortwave and longwave data products. These records were not suitable for archiving.

This paper presents an analysis by which the measurements can be processed to generate a useful data record. By use of the orbit parameters, the pattern of insolation dosage is computed for the duration of measurements. Due to the non-uniform degradation pattern, the solar calibration measurements are related to the degradation by an integral over the portion of the dome through which the Sun shines during calibration. The transmission pattern is computed as the solution of this integral equation. The shape factor can then be computed which incorporates this transmission pattern in order to calculate the Earth's albedo from the measurement. Also, with the shortwave irradiances computed, the longwave irradiances can be computed from the total channel measurements. The data record of the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite data set will be used to validate the results of this method.