ERBE - Assessment of measurement accuracy

The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) represents a continuing effort to estimate the solar incident and earth reflected and emitted radiance from spacecraft measurements. The development of accurate and stable sensors and calibration sources is mandatory but not sufficient to attain and validate required measurement accuracies. It is also necessary to develop and experimentally test computational models of the calibration and measurement processes to account for environmental differences between (static) calibrations and (dynamic) measurements of the earth radiant exitance that varies with wavelength, position, direction, and time.