The Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) measures the Earth's radiation budget and combines that with cloud properties to better understand cloud forcing and feedback. The CERES experiment is one of the highest priority scientific satellite instruments developed for the NASA EOS program. CERES products include both solar-reflected and Earth-emitted radiation from the top of the atmosphere to the Earth's surface. Cloud properties are determined using simultaneous measurements from other EOS instruments. Analyses of the CERES data, which build upon the foundation from previous missions, such as ERBE, will lead to a better understanding of the role of clouds and the energy cycle in global climate change.

The CERES data are processed, archived, and distributed at the Atmospheric Sciences Data Center at NASA's Langley Research Center. The Data Center currently has available the CERES Bi-Directional Scans (BDS) product which contains instantaneous Level-1B filtered broadband radiance measurements for total, shortwave, and window channels. CERES has released versions of three ERBE-like products to provide a long-term data set of continuous measurements of the Earth's radiation budget. Also available is the Single Scanner Footprint TOA/Surface Fluxes and Clouds (SSF) product, which contains one hour of instantaneous CERES data for a single scanner instrument combined with scene information and cloud properties from a higher-resolution imager.

Data, documentation and other information for both CERES and ERBE are available at the Data Center's web site: http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/