Radiation Budgets in Support of LBA Hydrological Modeling
Rachel
T
Pinker, University of Marylan, pinker@atmos.umd.edu
(Presenting)
Banglin
Zhang, University of Maryland, zhang@atmos.umd.edu
Hiroko
Kato, University of Maryland, hkato@atmos.umd.edu
Juan
C.
Ceballos, CPTEC-INPE, Cachoeira Paulista, ceballos@cptec.inpe.br
Enio
B.
Pereira, INPE, S. J. Campos, enio@dge.inpe.br
To improve the understanding of the hydrological cycle in the Amazon region, information on radiative fluxes is needed for modeling and predicting the surface hydrological and energy budgets on time scales from diurnal to interannual, and on spatial scales as required by climate models, meso-scale models, and at local scales. Such information is also needed to improve surface parameterizations, and to test their implications for global climate and weather forecast models.
To respond to these needs, about twenty years of historical satellite observations from PATHFINDER data were used to infer radiative fluxes at 2.5-degree resolution on global scale; a higher resolution GOES and METEOSAT observations were used to infer radiative fluxes at 0.5 degree resolution for about ten years to cover North and South America, using optimal interpolation techniques to merge the observations; pixel level data from GOES satellites were used to obtain radiative fluxes for the Amazon Basin at a 1/8-degree resolution for a period spanning three years during the LBA project. New methodologies were developed for implementing the inference schemes at this scale and for incorporating updated information on aerosols. The above products include information on total shortwave radiative fluxes, Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR), Near-Infra-Red (NIR) radiation (upwelling and downwelling), all at both boundaries of the atmosphere. The time scale for the first two products is 3 hourly instantaneous; hourly averaged; daily; and monthly means, while the high spatial resolution product is available at hourly time scale. In the presentation, described will be: methodologies used to infer such fluxes; the available products; and their evaluation against ground truth.