2009 Volume 29 Issue 2 Pages 392-397
To assess environmental change at global scale, accurate estimates of surface radiative fluxes at high temporal resolution are needed. An algorithm for the estimation of the shortwave radiation budget from the GMS-5/SVISSR data has been developed. In this study, a component of this algorithm used for deriving COT is evaluated. The COT retrieved from the GMS-5/SVISSR is compared with similar parameters derived from Terra/MODIS during APEX-E2. It was found that the assumption on the effective radius of clouds as well as the sensor quantization noise can introduce a large error in COT derived from GMS-5/SVISSR. In the present analysis we show that the errors in COT of area-level clouds in the aggregate due to unknown effective radius can be reduced progressively as compared to errors of pixel-level ones.
