Recent progress on evaluating and analysing surface radiation and energy budget datasets

• Published in: International Journal of Digital Earth
• Main Authors: Bo Jiang, Xiaotong Zhang, Dongdong Wang, Shunlin Liang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2023
• Subjects: Surface radiation; energy budget; estimation; evaluation; spatio-temporal variation; Mathematical geography. Cartography; GA1-1776; Arctic; albedo; permafrost
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2023.2286030; https://doaj.org/article/9979f25127ab46baadae5abcaa11eb41

ABSTRACTAlthough the surface energy budget is essential to determine Earth’s climate, site measurements of various radiative components are still too scarce to properly characterize their spatial and temporal variations. This has led to the development of a growing number of surface radiation products, mainly including remotely sensed data, model reanalysis data, and simulations using General Circulation Models (GCMs). This collection of papers introduces new techniques, including the use of machine learning methods for radiation estimation, and evaluates and compares various radiation products, as well as their spatio-temporal variations. These studies show large discrepancies among various products across nearly all radiative parameters in either accuracy or spatio-temporal variations. However, remotely sensed radiation products perform relatively better than others. Despite this, there is an urgent need for further efforts to address these discrepancies and improve the accuracy of these estimates. Even though the major radiative parameters including downward shortwave radiation, net longwave radiation, and albedo, from most products show insignificant long-term variation trends on a global scale, only specific regions, such as the Yunnan-Kweichow Plateau (YKP) and regions with permafrost (i.e. Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Arctic) and glaciers (i.e. Altai Mountains) exhibit remarkable trends.