A comparison of solar radiation budgets in the Mackenzie river basin from satellite measurements and a regional climate model

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Using a new narrowband to broadband conversion algorithm developed specifically for the Mackenzie River basin (MRB), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data for the summer of 1994 have been analyzed to obtain the top‐of‐the‐atmosphere (TOA) fluxes and the net surface solar radiation in the MRB. The AVHRR dataset contains mid‐afternoon scenes from 21 June to 14 September 1994. In addition, the Scanner for Radiation Budget (ScaRaB) instrument, which flew on the METEOR‐3 satellite, provided good coverage during the summer of 1994 with typically five passes over the northern part of the basin and three to four passes over the southern part of the basin each day. We merged the TOA fluxes from AVHRR with those from ScaRaB and then interpolated the observations (within ± 1.5 hours) to get the monthly means for each one‐hour period during the daytime for June, July, August and September 1994. The monthly means of each one‐hour average are compared with output from the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM). The comparison shows that the CRCM simulated the TOA reflected fluxes well over the MRB. However, the differences in the partitioning of the absorbed energy between the surface and the atmosphere are large, the CRCM overestimating the surface net solar radiation budgets by about 15%.