The Nimbus 7 ERB data set - A critical analysis

An analysis of the first year of the Nimbus 7 earth radiation budget data set reveals that there are systematic differences between wide and narrow field of view measurements. The larger differences appear in the albedo data and are due primarily to a bias introduced by the processing method. There are smaller differences, associated with the outgoing longwave radiation, which are probably due to errors in calibration. The bias in albedo originates in the factors used for converting the shortwave intensity measured at satellite altitude into a mean daily albedo at the top of the atmosphere. The factor that proves most troublesome is the one that converts measured intensity to the total instantaneous outgoing flux. That factor is determined by angular distribution models, which depend upon the type of scene within the target area. An alternative method of processing the data, which is model independent, is shown to have practically no bias and yields better over-all agreement with the wide field of view measurements.