Validating CERES Radiative Fluxes in the Arctic with Airborne Radiative Flux Measurements from the ARISE Campaign

Abstract:

The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments on board NASA’s Terra, Aqua, and Soumi-NPP satellites provide the only measurements of reflected solar shortwave and emitted longwave radiative flux over the Arctic. Various methods have shown the uncertainty of CERES fluxes over sea ice to be higher than other scene types. However validation against an independent radiative flux measurement has never been attempted. We present here an attempt to better quantify the uncertainty of time-and-space averaged CERES flux measurements using airborne measurements from the Arctic Radiation - IceBridge Sea Ice Experiment (ARISE). The ARISE campaign took place during September of 2014 based out of Fairbanks, Alaska, with most of the measurements taken in the vicinity of the sea ice edge between 125°W and 150°W, and 71°N to 77°N. For six of the flights, measurements were taken in a lawnmower type pattern over either 100 x 200 km box regions at a constant altitude of >6 km, or 100 x 100 km box regions at an altitude of between 200 m to 500 m. They were designed to resemble the CERES Level 3 spatial averaging grids, and were located and timed to coincide with a high number of CERES overpasses. On board the aircraft were a set of upward and downward facing shortwave and longwave broadband radiometers (BBR), along with other instruments measuring meteorological conditions and cloud properties. We have compared the broadband radiative fluxes from BBR with those from CERES for the three days where the aircraft was flying the high altitude pattern. We use the Fu-Liou radiative transfer model to account for differences in the measurement altitude between BBR and CERES. We will present results of the comparisons between the computed fluxes and the measured longwave and shortwave radiative fluxes.