Deriving Hourly Synoptic FLASHFlux High-Resolution Low-Latency Global Radiative Fluxes Using NASA Langley SatCORPS Global Cloud Composite Data

NASA’s Fast Longwave And SHortwave radiative Flux (FLASHFlux) project aims to generate low-latency operational global surface and top-of-atmosphere radiative flux data within one week of initial satellite measurements. The surface radiation budget is crucial for modulating and improving our understanding of many atmospheric, oceanic and land surface processes within the Earth system. The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget is a key radiative forcing in the climate system. NASA’s Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) is currently producing global radiation data using world-class satellite measurements. While CERES’s radiative flux products are of extremely high quality and accuracy, extensive data processing and months of validation are required to ensure their high accuracy before releasing climate-quality data. CERES data is typically released ~3 months after measurement acquisition. However, many users desire access to CERES data on a near real-time basis.

The FLASHFlux project provides a valuable resource for users who require near real-time global and regional radiative flux data. To improve efficiency, FLASHFlux has demonstrated its ability to generate high-quality radiative fluxes within a week of initial measurements while maintaining a certain level of accuracy using a simplified temporal extrapolation for CERES instrument calibration. FLASHFlux data provides daily average fluxes originally using both Terra and Aqua MODIS imagers and CERES measures.  However, now FLASHFlux only uses measurements from NOAA-20 satellite VIIRS and MODIS instruments. FLASHFlux’s existing algorithms utilize meteorological and surface data from the Goddard Earth Observing System Instrument Team reanalysis (GEOS-IT), a parameterized radiative algorithm for inferring surface radiative fluxes, and a diurnal variation model for temporal interpolation to compute estimates of the daily averaged radiative fluxes gridded to 1x1 degrees. To increase the diurnal sampling of clouds and improve the flux products, FLASHFlux data will leverage NASA Langley’s SatCORPS (Satellite ClOud and Radiation retrieval System) hourly Global Cloud Composite (GCC) data. SatCORPS GCC is a comprehensive algorithm designed to obtain high spatiotemporal resolution global cloud information fusing imagery data from operational geostationary and polar-orbiting meteorological satellites. Cloud, atmospheric and surface data are integrated into the NASA Langley CERES version of radiative transfer model to calculate radiative fluxes at the surface and TOA. FLASHFlux will generate a global hourly gridded radiative flux product with an initial resolution of 1°x1°, which will be increased to 0.5°x0.5° in future versions to meet the needs of users requiring near-real-time radiative flux data. An overview of progress towards promoting this new operation system and the resulting radiative fluxes are described.  Comparisons against formal CERES Ed4.2 SYN1Deg data products, current FLASHFlux products and limited sets of surface observations are presented where possible.