World Wide Web Access to Radiation Datasets for Environmental and Climate Change Studies

Abstract

Five years of scanner data from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), eight years of surface radiation budget (SRB) data, and one year of scanner radiation budget data from the French?Russian?German experiment, ScaRaB, will be available for use by colleges and universities [and primary and secondary (K?12) schools] over a World Wide Web browser. The database for ERBE is a 5?yr monthly average time series from February 1985 through December 1989, and ScaRaB is a 1?yr dataset from February 1994 to March 1995. ERBE and ScaRaB include shortwave radiative fluxes, emitted longwave radiative fluxes, and the earth's albedo measured at the top of the atmosphere. The SRB dataset spans the period from July 1983 through June 1991 and includes surface downward shortwave fluxes, surface downward longwave fluxes, surface albedos, and cloud percent. Students will have access to the data in three ways. They can display general image format images of any month and visually observe month?to?month or interannual variations. The data files for each month also have a spreadsheet format and can be downloaded in their entirety into any spreadsheet application program for further analysis. Third, using a live access server (LAS), students can interact directly with the data to select and subset datasets in terms of month, year, latitude, and longitude. The LAS allows students to view images of subsetted regions, and to subset data values to a file for further analysis. The server for this dataset is located at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia.