Merging High-Resolution Satellite Surface Radiation Data with Meteorological Sunshine Duration Observations over China from 1983 to 2017

Kaicun Wang,Fei Feng

doi:10.3390/rs13040602

Abstract

Surface solar radiation (Rs) is essential to climate studies. Thanks to long-term records from the Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometers (AVHRR), the recent release of International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) HXG cloud products provide a promising opportunity for building long-term Rs data with high resolutions (3 h and 10 km). In this study, we compare three satellite Rs products based on AVHRR cloud products over China from 1983 to 2017 with direct observations of Rs and sunshine duration (SunDu)-derived Rs. The results show that SunDu-derived Rs have higher accuracy than the direct observed Rs at time scales of a month or longer by comparing with the satellite Rs products. SunDu-derived Rs is available from the 1960s at more than 2000 stations over China, which provides reliable decadal estimations of Rs. However, the three AVHRR-based satellite Rs products have significant biases in quantifying the trend of Rs from 1983 to 2016 (−4.28 W/m2/decade to 2.56 W/m2/decade) due to inhomogeneity in satellite cloud products and the lack of information on atmospheric aerosol optical depth. To adjust the inhomogeneity of the satellite Rs products, we propose a geographically weighted regression fusion method (HGWR) to merge ISCCP-HXG Rs with SunDu-derived Rs. The merged Rs product over China from 1983 to 2017 with a spatial resolution of 10 km produces nearly the same trend as that of the SunDu-derived Rs. This study makes a first attempt to adjust the inhomogeneity of satellite Rs products and provides the merged high-resolution Rs product from 1983 to 2017 over China, which can be downloaded freely.

Highlights

Long-term changes in surface solar radiation (Rs, spectral range of 0.3–3.0 μm) with a decrease from the 1950s to the late 1980s and a subsequent increase have been observed worldwide [1,2,3,4,5]
To adjust the inhomogeneity of the satellite Rs products, we propose a geographically weighted regression fusion method (HGWR) to merge International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP)-HXG derived Rs (HXG) Rs with sunshine duration (SunDu)-derived Rs
HXG merged with SunDu-derived Rs (HGWR) show best performances followed by HXG, GEWEX and CMSAF

Summary

Introduction

Long-term changes in surface solar radiation (Rs , spectral range of 0.3–3.0 μm) with a decrease (global dimming) from the 1950s to the late 1980s and a subsequent increase (global brightening) have been observed worldwide [1,2,3,4,5]. Global dimming and brightening inevitably lead to energy balance changes and have substantial impacts on land surface climate, hydrologic cycle, carbon cycle and human activity [6,7,8,9]. Careful calibration and instrument maintenance are needed to guarantee the accuracy of observations. China replaced its instruments from 1990 to 1993. The new solar trackers frequently failed and introduced a high missing data rate for the direct radiation component of Rs [13,14].

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion