EGU2020-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-2025
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Best practices for surface radiation observations from long-term moored buoys

Robert Weller1, J. Thomas Farrar1, Sebastien Bigorre1, Jason Smith1, James Potemra2, and Fernando Santiago-Mandujano2
Robert Weller et al.
  • 1Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, United States of America
  • 2University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of America

The Upper Ocean Process Group of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution deploys moorings with surface buoys instrumented with incoming shortwave and longwave radiometers at locations around the world.  The procedures used to calibrate the radiometers in the laboratory and to assess their performance at sea are discussed.  Some mooring deployments are done during collaborative field experiments and are months to a year in length.  Three other sites are being maintained as long-term Ocean Reference Stations (ORS), with sequential one-year deployments being used to collect ongoing time series.  The Stratus ORS, located under the marine stratus clouds off northern Chile, has been collecting surface radiation observations since 2000.  The NTAS ORS in the western tropical Atlantic has collected surface radiation data since 2001; and the WHOTS ORS north of island of Oahu, Hawaii has collected surface radiation data since 2004.  Challenges encountered in making the surface radiation observations are discussed, and the best estimates of observational uncertainties are presented.  With this understanding of the accuracies of the observations, comparisons between the buoy observations and surface radiation values from models and reanalyses are shown.  Work underway on further improvements to the approaches taken to make surface radiation observations from moored buoy are discussed, and a suggestion for field intercomparisons with other oceanic and land-based surface radiation observing platforms is put forward.

How to cite: Weller, R., Farrar, J. T., Bigorre, S., Smith, J., Potemra, J., and Santiago-Mandujano, F.: Best practices for surface radiation observations from long-term moored buoys, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-2025, 2020

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