A Fifteen Year Time Series of Longwave and Shortwave Radiation Measurements for Environmental and Climate Change Studies

Fifteen years of monthly averaged wide field-of-view (WFOV) outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and reflected shortwave radiation (RSW) numerical filter, 5 degree regional measurements from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) is made available on the Internet/Web for use by the scientific community. This 15-year data set is from WFOV measurements taken by the dedicated Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) which is in an orbit of 57 degree inclination and precesses through all local times in 72 days. The data set has been reprocessed to remove measurements in regions with poor temporal sampling. The data set spans the period from November 1984 through September 1999 and can be viewed and accessed using a web browser located on a server at NASA, Langley Research Center. The browser uses a live access server (LAS) developed by the Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. LAS allows scientists to interact directly with the data to view, select, and subset the data in terms of month, year, latitude, and longitude. In addition to OLR and RSW measurements, statistics that result from calculating regional averages will be discussed. These statistics include shortwave standard deviation, longwave standard deviation, and the number of measurements that go into each average. The problem of regions with no data will also be discussed.