CERES radiation budget accuracy overview

The CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System) data products from Terra and Aqua represent a new generation of radiation budget data from the surface of the Earth, into the atmosphere, to the Top of Atmosphere. The data products range from simple ERBE-Like TOA fluxes for historical consistency in algorithms and analysis, to use of up to 11 instruments on 7 spacecraft to improve the 8-dimensional sampling problem that is the essence of the radiation budget problem (e.g. Wielicki et al., 1995 BAMS). The 8-dimensions include wavelength, latitude, longitude, height, time, viewing zenith angle, viewing azimuth angle, and solar zenith angle. Intercalibration of observations in this 8-dimensional space can be thought of as a phantom 9th dimension. This presentation will summarize the CERES Science Team's current understanding of the error budget at a range of time and space scales from instantaneous fluxes in a CERES field of view, to monthly average gridded data, to zonal and global mean net radiation. Error estimates will summarize progress in both surface fluxes as well as TOA fluxes, and compare the progress to the pre-launch mission goals (e.g. Wielicki et al., 1996 BAMS). Knowledge of these errors effect everything from testing of climate models to climate trend detection to prioritizing future climate observing system improvements. This presentation will attempt to integrate errors from the complete range of 8-dimensional sampling as well as calibration for the overall radiation budget of the Earth. The results will also be compared to the traditional ERBE TOA flux uncertainties, and summarize the advances over the ERBE era data.