35-years of Land Surface Albedo and 15-years of Down-Welling Short-Wave Radiation retrievals from Earth Observations in the framework of two European space programs
Abstract
The Earth has a complex climate system, driven, to a certain extent, by the amount of solar energy that is absorbed by the surface. Such net solar radiation at the Earth's surface is usually calculated by combining two radiative quantities: incoming solar radiation with land surface albedo (also called reflectivity). Land surface albedo has a complex dependency on the surface properties (vegetation phenology, soil moisture, type of ground to name some of them), while down-welling short-wave radiation essentially depends on solar zenith angle, cloud coverage, aerosol load, gases absorption, and land surface albedo. Several space programs provide estimates of these two satellite radiative quantities (land surface albedo and down-welling short-wave radiation) in order to monitor human-induced climate change.
The EUMETSAT/LSA-SAF project started in 1999 with research and development activities ( http://lsa-saf.eumetsat.int/ ) . The delivered operational products include all components of the surface radiation budget such as land surface albedo, temperature, short-wave and long-wave down-welling radiation fluxes. After twenty years (1999-2019) of research, development, and progressive operational activities, we built on a strong expertise on satellite retrieval of the surface albedo and down-welling short-wave radiation variables. Based on that experience, we started in 2016 within the framework of the ECMWF/COPERNICUS/C3S_312 project to develop consistent surface albedo products from the 80's until now using multiple sensors from the past to the current generation of instruments ( https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/ ). This complementary work from these two projects will lead to generation of more than 35 years of satellite products characterizing the albedo properties of the surface and 15 years of short-wave down-welling radiation fluxes from different satellite sensors. Product characteristics, and performances are presented. The next scientific challenges related to the next generation of European satellites and the emergence of artificial intelligence are also presented and discussed. Through this work, one objective of our community is to estimate how the past changes of land surface albedo, mainly due to land cover changes, have impacted the global radiative forcing of the Earth.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B23C..04C
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0426 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0430 Computational methods and data processing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES