Summary

Description

The NASA/GEWEX Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) Release-3.0 data sets contains global 3-hourly, daily, monthly/3-hourly, and monthly averages of surface and top-of atmosphere (TOA) longwave and shortwave radiative parameters on a 1?x1? grid. Model inputs of cloud amounts and other atmospheric state parameters are also available in some of the data sets. Primary inputs to the models include: visible and infrared radiances from International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) pixel-level (DX) data, cloud and surface properties derived from those data, temperature and moisture profiles from GEOS-4 reanalysis product obtained from the NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), and column ozone amounts constituted from Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) archives, and Stratospheric Monitoring-group's Ozone Blended Analysis (SMOBA), an assimilation product from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. SRB products are reformatted for the use of renewable energy and agricultural communities and made available through the Surface meteorology and Solar Energy (SSE) website. SRB products now overlap a portion of surface and TOA flux data sets that are available from Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project. These CERES data products and those from the CERES Fast Longwave and SHortwave Radiative Fluxes (FLASHFlux) project extend past the SRB time frame. The latter project provides radiative fluxes on a near real-time basis. The CERES and CERES/FLASHFlux data sets also make use of global observations from Moderate-resolution Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MODIS) instruments. Release-3.0 products differ substantially from earlier SRB Releases (2.0 and 2.5) arising from numerous improvements of the algorithms and input data sets. Temporal coverage of Release-3.0 is extended to December 2007; Release-2.5 ended in June 2005. A modified version of the GEWEX Longwave data set, denoted as version 3.1, corrects for a numerical instability issue that was found to affect a small number of 3 hourly grid box TOA outgoing and surface downward fluxes in the release 3.0 longwave products .On-line documentation provides information on all changes applicable to Release-3.0. Users are encouraged to consult on-line documentation prior to using these data sets. In addition to the big-endian binary formatted files of previous releases, Release-3.0 SW/3.1 LW are now available in netCDF format.