Transfer method to calibrate the normalized radiance for a CE318 Sun/sky radiometer

Abstract

A transfer method is introduced to derive the normalized radiance for CE318 Sun/sky radiometer using viewing solid angles and extraterrestrial calibration constants. The new transfer method has a good consistency at different parts of the sky scanning. Error analysis suggests that the uncertainty of the transferred method is about 2.0%–2.4%. The normalized radiances are used as input of the aerosol inversion to test the performance of the new transfer method. The residuals of the inversion (e.g., difference between fitted and measured radiance) are chosen as the index of the radiance calibration accuracy. Analyses of one year’s measurements in Beijing suggest an average sky residual of 3.3% for almucantar scanning (while 3.7% for the AERONET method), which suggest a better accuracy of the transfer method when used in aerosol retrieval.