Surface radiation at sea validation of satellite-derived data with shipboard measurements

Abstract

Quality-controlled and validated radiation products are the basis for their ability to serve the climate and solar energy community. Satellite-derived radiation fluxes are well preferred for this task as they cover the whole research area in time and space. In order to monitor the accuracy of these data, validation with well maintained and calibrated ground based measurements is necessary. Over sea, however, long-term accurate reference data sets from calibrated instruments recording radiation are scarce. Therefore data from research vessels operating at sea are used to perform a reasonable validation. A prerequisite is that the instruments on board are maintained as well as land borne stations. This paper focuses on the comparison of radiation data recorded on board of the German Research Vessel "Meteor" during her 13 months cruise across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea with CM-SAF products using NOAA- and MSG-data (August 2006-August 2007): surface incoming short-wave radiation (SIS) and surface downward long-wave radiation (SDL). Measuring radiation fluxes at sea causes inevitable errors, e.g.shadowing of fields of view of the radiometers by parts of the ship. These ship-inherent difficulties are discussed at first. A comparison of pairs of ship-recorded and satellite-derived mean fluxes for the complete measuring period delivers a good agreement: the mean bias deviation (MBD) for SIS daily means is −7.6 W/m2 with a median bias of −4 W/m2 and consistently the MBD for monthly means is −7.3 W/m2, for SDL daily means the MBD is 8.1 and 6 W/m2 median bias respectively. The MBD for monthly means is 8.2 W/m2. The variances of the daily means (ship and satellite) have the same annual courses for both fluxes. No significant dependence of the bias on the total cloud cover recorded according to WMO (1969) has been found. The results of the comparison between ship-based observations and satellite retrieved surface radiation reveal the good accuracy of the satellite-based CM-SAF products over sea.