Background

Background

The NASA Energy and Water Cycle Study (NEWS) program aims to integrate model, satellite and in-situ datasets to quantify the rate and variation of water and energy cycling throughout the globe. A major goal of NEWS is to assess model performance in critical regions to better understand how to improve their performance so uncertainties can be reduced. This requires long term records of global observations of energy and water cycle variables to characterize variability. To meet such objectives, we have integrated past and current space based and in situ observations that can be used to address numerous issues, such as droughts, or ENSO related modulations of the surface radiation budget. Specifically, information on surface shortwave and longwave radiative fluxes based on the ISCCP DX products for the period July 1983-2009 have been derived and augmented with information based on MODIS (Terra and Aqua) data. Preliminary evaluation of several ISCCP SW (total) products has shown that discrepancies against observations over water are larger than over land. Subsequently, these two data sets were merged by removing biases in the ISCCP data in respect to MODIS. These data are provided here for the Tropical Pacific.

References

Pinker, R. T., A. Bentamy, B. Zhang, W. Chen, and Y. Ma (2017), The net energy budget at the ocean-atmosphere interface of the "Cold Tongue" region. J. Geophys. Res.- Oceans, 122, doi: 10.1002/ 2016JC012581.

Pinker, R. T., S. A. Grodsky, B. Zhang, A. Busalacchi, and W. Chen (2017), ENSO Impact on Surface Radiative Fluxes as Observed from Space. In press, J. Geophys. Res.- Oceans.

Kumar, M. R. Ramesh, Rachel T. Pinker, Simi Mathew, R. Venkatesan and W. Chen (2017), Evaluation of radiative fluxes over the north Indian Ocean. Theor Appl Climatol, doi 10.1007/s00704-017-2141-6.

Wang, S.-Y. Simon, Joe Santanello, Hailan Wang, Rachel Pinker, Danny Barandiaran, Siegfried Schubert, Robert Gillies, Kyle Hilburn, Bob Oglesby, Kyle Hilburn, Ayse Kilic, and Paul Houser (2014), Flashinness of drought in 2012: Cliamte change signal and prediction hopeful. NOAA's 39th Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Workshop, Louis, Missouri, 20-23 October 2014.

Wang*, S.-Y. Simon, Danny Barandiaran, Kyle Hilburn, Paul Houser, Bob Oglesby, Ming Pan, Rachel T. Pinker, Joe Santanello, Siegfried Schubert, and Hailan Wang (2014), Could the 2012 Drought Have Been Anticipated? -- A NASA NEWS Initiative. Science and Technology Infusion Climate Bulletin NOAA's National Weather Service 38th NOAA Annual Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Workshop College Park, MD, 21-24 October 2013. * Group members in alphabetic order after S. Wang.