![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20080920130138im_/http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov//15190/outlw-gal.png)
Images & Animations
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Credit
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Instantaneous Outgoing Longwave Flux (WMS)
The Earth's climate is determined by energy transfer from the sun to the Earth's land, oceans, and atmosphere. As the Earth rotates, the sun lights up only part of the Earth at a time, and some of that incoming solar energy is reflected and some is absorbed, depending on type of area it lights. The amount of reflection and absorption is critical to the climate. An instrument named CERES orbits the Earth every 99 minutes and measures the reflected solar energy. This animation shows the outgoing thermal radiation measured by CERES during 29 orbits on June 20 and 21 of 2003. Thermal radiation is longwave radiation and depends on the temperature of the earth, with the most intense radiation coming from the warmest regions and the least from cold clouds in the atmosphere. Although cold clouds and the cold Antarctic night regions can be seen in this data, the Earth radiates pretty uniformly in the longwave bands because the atmosphere distributes the heat of the sun to the whole planet.
This animation shows 29 orbits (2 days) of CERES measurements of outgoing longwave radiation, from June 20-21, 2003.
Metadata
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Sensor
Terra/CERES -
Animation ID
3107 -
Start Timecode
00:00:00:00 -
End Timecode
00:00:00:00 -
Animator
Horace Mitchell, Eric Sokolowsky -
Studio
SVS -
Visualization Date
2005/02/01 -
Scientist
Bruce Wielicki (NASA/LaRC) -
Datasets
Outgoing Longwave Flux -
Keywords
GCMD--EARTH SCIENCE--Atmosphere--Atmospheric Radiation--Outgoing Longwave Radiation, GCMD--EARTH SCIENCE--Oceans--Ocean Heat Budget--Longwave Radiation -
Georeference Data
[-180,-90,180,90] -
Data Date
2003/06/20-2003/06/22 -
Story URL
http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/ceres/ASDceres.html -
Animation Type
Regular