Average Total-Sky Outgoing Shortwave Flux

  • Credit

    NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Average Total-sky Outgoing Shortwave 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 average amount of reflection and absorption is critical to the climate, because the absorbed energy heats up the Earth until it is radiated away as thermal radiation. This animation shows the monthly average outgoing shortwave radiation from July, 2002 through June, 2004 as measured by the CERES instrument. This is the sunlight that is directly reflected back into space by clouds, ice, desert, and other physical areas on the Earth. Although clouds are very reflective, they come and going during the month, so more reflection is seen on average from ice sheets, which change very little during a monthly period. Note that the cloud-free parts of the ocean are relatively dark, indicating that oceans absorb more sunlight tahn they reflect.

This animation shows the monthly average total-sky outgoing shortwave flux from CERES for July 2002 through June 2004.

Metadata

  • Sensor

    Terra/CERES

  • Animation ID

    3097

  • 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 Shortwave Radiation

  • Keywords

    GCMD--EARTH SCIENCE--Atmosphere--Atmospheric Radiation--Shortwave Radiation, GCMD--EARTH SCIENCE--Oceans--Ocean Heat Budget--Shortwave Radiation

  • Georeference Data

    [-180,-90,180,90]

  • Data Date

    2002/07/01-2004/06/30

  • Story URL

    http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/ceres/ASDceres.html

  • Animation Type

    Regular