92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Wednesday, 25 January 2012: 1:45 PM
Towards A High Resolution NASA/GEWEX Surface Radiation Budget
Room 257 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Stephen J. Cox, SSAI, Hampton, VA; and P. W. Stackhouse, S. K. Gupta, J. C. Mikovitz, and T. Zhang

Elsewhere in this conference, Gupta et al. present the current Release 3.0 of the NASA/GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment) Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) project, which uses satellite-derived cloud and radiance data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) project along with other datasets to derive global 1°x1° surface and TOA fluxes for the 1983-2007 period. These results have proven useful to the climate modeling, agriculture, architecture, oceanography, and energy communities, among others. The ISCCP team is currently reprocessing their historical data to provide recalibrated data at an effective 10 km resolution, up from 30 km in the version used in SRB Release 3.0. Both ISCCP and SRB have collaborated to homogenize ancillary inputs such as atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles, trace gas concentrations, aerosol properties and surface properties. Each team has worked to improve algorithms and expand output parameters.

Future versions of SRB will use the improved ISCCP and ancillary data sets to provide higher resolution flux data. Besides providing the current 1°x1° products for GEWEX, SRB is working to increase resolution to 0.5°x0.5°. An additional option for the shortwave model is to calculate fluxes on a 10km pixel level. This work is being pursued to benefit the solar power industry sector. This presentation will provide an overview of the upgrades and status for the next version SRB, Release 4.0. It will provide a first look at pixel-level results based on preliminary data provided by ISCCP. Results from additional resolutions are provided. We will compare these results to Release 3.0 results and assess the data quality relative to surface resolution using BSRN (Baseline Surface Radiation Network) measurements. Finally, this presentation concludes by discussing the next steps required for the production of the next full SRB release.

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