All-sky surface and top-of-atmosphere shortwave radiation components estimation: Surface shortwave radiation, PAR, UV radiation, and TOA albedo

Abstract

Surface and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) shortwave radiation components are key parameters in the energy budget of the Earth-atmosphere system, which influence the global climate, ecology, hydrology, etc. However, except for total surface shortwave downward radiation (SWDR), only a few satellite missions consistently release other radiation components such as solar direct/diffuse radiation, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), ultraviolet radiation-A/B (UVA/UVB), as well as TOA albedo, although they are indispensable for many land and ocean applications. In this study, a unified framework by combining multi-band LUT inversion and classification of the atmospheric condition is proposed, which enables the simultaneous derivation of nine surface and TOA radiation variables and emphasizes the separation of direct and diffuse components. The estimated radiation variables include total and direct components of SWDR, PAR, UVA, UVB, as well as TOA albedo. The proposed method is easy-to-use with only a few inputs and works well with reasonable accuracy. Using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) raw resolution images as test data, the surface radiation variables are validated by 80 global sites from BSRN, SURFRAD, and FLUXNET, and the instantaneous RMSEs (biases) of SWDR, SWDRdir, PAR, PARdiff, and UVB are 103.6 (0.1), 114 (−1.7), 47.8 (6.8), 32.9 (5.7), and 0.14 (0.003) W/m2, respectively, demonstrating comparable or even better accuracy compared with existing products. In particular, the estimated SWDR behaves more accurate than CERES in polar regions. Due to the lack of in-situ measurements, TOA albedo is compared with CERES TOA products and shows good agreement with R2 of 0.9 and RMSE (bias) of 0.055 (−0.003). The unified framework reveals obvious advantages over existing studies in generating almost all physically consistent shortwave components in the same manner with simple inputs, implying the great potentials in globally mapping spatio-temporally continuous multiple components of shortwave radiation with a unified scheme.