Improved Diurnal Interpolation of Reflected Broadband Shortwave Observations Using ISCCP Data

Abstract

The multisatellite Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) was designed to provide complete temporal coverage of the solar-reflected and earth-emitted radiation. Following operation of ERBE scanners on as few as one and as many as three satellites between November 1984 and February 1990, narrow-field-of-view earth radiation budget measurements were resumed in March 1994 by the Scanner for Radiation Budget (ScaRaB) mission and in December 1997 by the first Clouds and the Earth?s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument, each time on a single satellite. Due to sparse temporal sampling, diurnal variations must be accounted for in order to establish accurate unbiased daily and monthly mean radiant exitance. When the ERBE diurnal interpolation algorithm is used alone, large discrepancies appear between monthly mean radiative fluxes obtained from single- and multisatellite data. The authors extend the algorithm by accounting for diurnally varying cloud cover using International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) data products. Significant improvements are found in regions where clouds have a pronounced diurnal cycle. Further improvements are obtained by also taking into account diurnal variations of cloud properties such as optical thickness using either ISCCP cloud radiance data or a cloud classification. These approaches require the development of directional models to represent the angular dependence of the cloud albedo corresponding to the ISCCP cloud classification.