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ISLSCP Initiative II |
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Radiation and Clouds Data
This data set contains global Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) and a few TOA radiation budget parameters on a 1° x 1° spatial resolution. These parameters are provided as monthly, monthly-3 hourly (i.e. monthly average for a particular 3 hourly period) and 3 hourly averages. All monthly parameters include files with a monthly mean value, a monthly standard deviation, and monthly minimum and maximum values.
The surface and TOA Shortwave (SW) radiative parameters were computed with the Pinker and Laszlo (1992) radiation model that had only minor updates since then. The Longwave (LW) SRB parameters were derived with the Gupta et al. (1992) model. Meteorological inputs for all processing were taken from the Goddard Earth Observing System version 1 (GEOS-1) reanalysis data sets (Schubert et al., 1993) from the Data Assimilation Office (DAO), at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Required cloud parameters were derived at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) from International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) DX data using the algorithms developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) (Rossow et al., 1996). Surface albedos are derived internally in the Pinker and Laszlo SW model.
Data Provider: Paul W. Stackhouse, Shashi K. Gupta
 Data Files (stored at the Goddad DAAC) |
 Data Set Documentation |
 Image Viewing Tutorial |
The files have been compressed using the PKZip program. Each uncompressed file contains space-delimited ASCII text with 360 values per line and 180 lines of data (1 degree resolution). Each line is terminated by a newline character. The data are structured so that the upperleft corner of the first pixel is located at 90 North latitude and 180 West longitude. Each pixel represents a 1 by 1 degree area, with the pixel edges falling on whole degree boundaries.
The data is on three different time scales: monthly, diurnal, and 3-hourly. The monthly data is average data for a whole month. The diurnal data is average data for each 3-hour period in a day, averaged for each month (e.g. 0 to 3 AM, averaged for all of January 1986). The 3-hourly data is average data for each 3-hour period of every day of a month.
The files contain a variety of different data types, listed in the table below.
| File Abbrev. | Type of Data | Temporal Coverage |
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| calb | clear-sky surface albedo | monthly |
| cdsf | clear-sky downward sw flux | monthly, diurnal |
| dif | all-sky diffuse sw flux | monthly, diurnal |
| dlf | all-sky downward lw flux | monthly, diurnal, 3-hourly |
| dsf | all-sky downward sw flux | monthly, diurnal, 3-hourly |
| nlf | all-sky net lw flux | monthly, diurnal, 3-hourly |
| nsf | all-sky net sw flux | monthly, diurnal |
| ntf | all-sky net total flux | monthly, diurnal |
| par | all-sky par flux | monthly, diurnal |
| sfal | all-sky surface albedo | monthly |
| tin | toa insolation | monthly, diurnal |
| trsf | toa reflected sw flux | monthly, diurnal |
| ulf | surface upward lw flux | monthly, diurnal |
| usf | surface upward sw flux | monthly |
Related Pages:
ISLSCP Initiative II Home
General Data Overview
Radiation Data Overview
SRB Radiation Data
Revision Date: July 2, 2004