Instantaneous Outgoing Longwave Flux

  • 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

  • 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