Earth’s Radiation Budget Variability During 2015 El Nino From CERES FLASHFlux and EBAF Data.

Abstract:

The Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) Fast Longwave And SHortwave Radiative Fluxes (FLASHFlux) data products were introduced at the NASA Langley Research Center to address the need of the agricultural, renewable energy management, and science communities for global surface and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes on a near real-time basis. This has been accomplished by enhancing the speed of CERES processing using simplified calibration and averaging techniques and fast radiation parameterizations to produce fluxes within a week of real-time. While the resulting products are not considered to be sufficiently accurate for studying long-term climate trends, they satisfy the needs for many near real-time scientific data analyses and societal applications.

One of the uses of FLASHFlux data is for the evaluation of flux variability and extremes relative to climatological means. Normalizing FLASHFlux TOA fluxes with CERES Energy Balance And Filled (EBAF) TOA fluxes on a global scale, we are able to provide one-year flux change and flux anomalies relative to the EBAF TOA climatology for the “State of the Climate” report (published annually as a BAMS supplement). In this presentation, we extend our analysis to assess the seasonal variability and extremes for most of the year 2015 on a 1-degree regional scale. We also highlight the differences between FLASHFlux surface fluxes compared to the Surface EBAF flux products and assess the feasibility of normalizing the FLASHFLux surface fluxes to surface EBAF to provide surface flux anomalies on a regional scale. Using these anomalies for the TOA and possibly surface fluxes, we assess the radiative flux anomalies of the currently evolving 2015 El Nino on global and regional scales.