Continuity of Climate data Records from the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) on the NPOESS Preparatory Project

The CERES project at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) provides critical cloud and Earth radiation budget Climate Data Records (CDRs) to support global climate change research. An international Science Team based at LaRC blends expertise in broadband radiometry, cloud and radiation remote sensing, and climate modeling for scientific analysis, investigations and development of CERES data products. CERES has produced over 30 Instrument years of data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), Terra and Aqua, and is preparing to collect, calibrate, process and distribute data from CERES Flight Model 5 (FM-5) on the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP). A complex system of instrument calibration, algorithm development, data collection, processing, archive and distribution is being developed called the Earth Radiation Budget Climate Analysis Research System (ERB CARS) to manage science data from CERES on NPP. The ERB CARS builds on existing processes and resources already in place to support CERES data from Terra and Aqua. ERB CARS is an element of the NPP Science Data Segment, and receives NPP data from the Land Product Evaluation and Test Element (PEATE) at GSFC. [1] The CERES data system integrates data from multiple sources to produce an extensive set of high quality climate data records. In addition to imager data, aerosols, ozone, precipitable water, snow/ice, and meteorological and geostationary data are fused to produce hourly, 6-hour, daily and monthly averages. For NPP, CERES data will be fused with clouds and aerosol information obtained using VIIRS radiance and geolocation and aerosol optical depth data, allowing accurate and stable calibration of VIIRS radiances critical to maintaining high quality CERES CDRs. New science processing algorithms will provide improved clouds and aerosol information that feed flux calculations and time and space averaging, and will be applied to processing CERES NPP data. A more robust ground calibration campaign has also been developed for the CERES sensors. The addition of CERES data from NPP will extend critical Earth radiation budget climate data records well into the next decade. This paper will describe the calibration improvements, data flow, science data processing, and distribution of CERES data from NPP.