Transfer of radiometric standards between multiple low earth orbit climate observing broadband radiometers: application to CERES

Grant Matthews; Kory Priestley; Susan Thomas

doi:10.1117/12.734478

5 October 2007 Transfer of radiometric standards between multiple low earth orbit climate observing broadband radiometers: application to CERES

Grant Matthews, Kory Priestley, Susan Thomas

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6677, Earth Observing Systems XII; 66770I (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.734478
Event: Optical Engineering + Applications, 2007, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) is the only project currently measuring the global Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) from space. Two CERES instruments are located on the EOS Terra platform and two more are placed on the EOS Aqua satellite. One more CERES unit provided 8 months of ERB data in 1998 from the TRMM platform. Each of the CERES devices uses three broadband radiometric scanning telescopes: the shortwave (SW 0.3 → 5μm), Total (0.3 → 100μm), and window (8 → 12μm) channels. Rigorous pre-launch ground calibration is performed on each CERES unit to achieve an accuracy goal of 1% for Short Wave (SW) and 0.5% for outgoing Long Wave (LW) radiance. Any ground to flight or in-flight changes in radiometer response is monitored using onboard calibration sources. For the total and window channels these take the form of concentric groove blackbodies, while the SW channels use stable tungsten lamps. Recent studies have shown that the SW response of space based broadband radiometers can change dramatically due to optical contamination. With these changes having most impact on optical response to blue-UV radiance, where tungsten lamps are largely devoid of output, such changes are hard to monitor accurately using existing on-board sources. This study details an attempt to use the vicarious stability metric of deep convective clouds (DCC), nighttime LW scenes and a newly developed SW optical darkening model to place all CERES instrument measurements on the same radiometric scale. The results show that scene dependant dispersion in nadir comparisons between instruments on the same satellite are significantly reduced. Also the suggestion is that the pre-flight contamination of the CERES instruments may require an increase in Terra and Aqua measured SW flux. A larger necessary increase in Aqua SW flux is believed to be due to greater pre-flight contamination of the CERES Aqua optics.

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Grant Matthews, Kory Priestley, and Susan Thomas "Transfer of radiometric standards between multiple low earth orbit climate observing broadband radiometers: application to CERES", Proc. SPIE 6677, Earth Observing Systems XII, 66770I (5 October 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.734478

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