Balloon-based soundings have been carried out for more than 100 years and have since formed an important database and reference for characterizing the 3-dimensional structure of the atmosphere. In addition to the meteorological standard variables trace gases, aerosol and radiation profiles have recently also been recorded using radiosondes.
Since this is significantly more expensive equipment compared to a standard radiosonde, some more effort is required to enable safe soundings and transfer back home for each case. The repetition rates of the soundings are consequently much lower than those of the operational measurements.
The measurement conditions during the sounding differ significantly from the usual conditions for radiation measurements near the ground: temperatures down to -85°C at the tropopause level, rapid temperature changes of more than 50 K/h at an ascent rate of 5 m/s and possible impacts of liquid and iced cloud droplets on the observations need to be handled. This requires adjustments to the acquisition of measured values and a careful selection of the launch time.
At Lindenberg Meteorological Observatory (52.21° north, 14.12° east) of the German Weather Service, a total of 68 all-season sounding flights have been carried out since April 2015 with modified radiosondes of the Meteolabor SRS-C34 and SRS-C50 type with added upward and downward solar and terrestrial radiation.
This presentation is discussing and interpreting the observational results of individual cloudless cases as well as soundings passing low, medium and high clouds. The downward fluxes are significantly modified below the tropopause. On the other hand, reflected radiation and terrestrial radiation are not only subject to local changes, even up to an altitude of 34 km, which can be quantified by including data on land use and cloud cover.
In addition, we will show the result of a case study where the radiative fluxes observed in and around clouds are used to validate corresponding numerical simulations performed with the ICON-ART model.
How to cite: Becker, R., Wacker, S., Doppler, L., Filipitsch, F., and Philipona, R.: In situ observation of radiative fluxes from surface to lower stratosphere, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-406, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-406, 2022.
