Abstract
Land surface albedo determines the splitting of downwelling solar radiation into components which are either reflected back to the atmosphere or absorbed by the surface. Land surface albedo is an important variable for the climate community, and therefore was defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV). Within the scope of the Satellite Application Facility for Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) of EUMETSAT (European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), a near-real time (NRT) daily albedo product was developed in the last decade from observations provided by the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on board the geostationary satellites of the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) series. In this study we present a new collection of albedo satellite products based on the same satellite data. The MSG Ten-day Albedo (MTAL) product incorporates MSG observations over 31 days with a frequency of NRT production of 10 days. The MTAL collection is more dedicated to climate analysis studies compared to the daily albedo that was initially designed for the weather prediction community. For this reason, a homogeneous reprocessing of MTAL was done in 2018 to generate a climate data record (CDR). The resulting product is called MTAL-R and has been made available to the community in addition to the NRT version of the MTAL product which has been available for several years. The retrieval algorithm behind the MTAL products comprises three distinct modules: One for atmospheric correction, one for daily inversion of a semi-empirical model of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function, and one for monthly composition, that also determines surface albedo values. In this study the MTAL-R CDR is compared to ground surface measurements and concomitant albedo products collected by sensors on-board polar-orbiting satellites (SPOT-VGT and MODIS). We show that MTAL-R meets the quality requirements if MODIS or SPOT-VGT are considered as reference. This work leads to 14 years of production of geostationary land surface albedo products with a guaranteed continuity in the LSA SAF for the future years with the forthcoming third generation of European geostationary satellites.
Highlights
The monitoring of the climate of our planet has become essential in the current context of climate change [1]
Land surface albedo is an important variable for the climate community
Surface albedo was defined as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), as it stands for the ratio of the radiation reflected from the surface of the Earth to the total incoming radiation
Summary
The monitoring of the climate of our planet has become essential in the current context of climate change [1]. Proper monitoring is impossible without long term and accurate observations of climate variables [2,3] These long-term observations are nowadays available thanks to the data collected during the past decades by the instruments on board Earth observation satellites. These data time series allow the climate community to study and monitor the underlying Earth’s surface and atmosphere for a long and climatologically relevant period of time. As surface albedo drives the Earth’s energy budget, it gains prominence in numerical weather prediction models and general circulation models [4] This surface variable is required to understand the phenomena that take place in the lower layers of the atmosphere and to constrain the surface atmosphere coupled models. Albedo values at different wavelengths contain a wealth of information about the physical state of the surface that can be used for a variety of applications such as vegetation monitoring and land cover classification
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