New, viable, and sustainable observation strategies from a constellation of satellites have attracted great attention across many scientific communities. Yet the potential for monitoring global Earth outgoing radiation using such a strategy has not been explored. To evaluate the potential of such a constellation concept and to investigate the configuration requirement for measuring radiation at a time resolution sufficient to resolve the diurnal cycle for weather and climate studies, we have developed a new recovery method and conducted a series of simulation experiments. Using idealized wide field-of-view broadband radiometers as an example, we find that a baseline constellation of 36 satellites can monitor global Earth outgoing radiation reliably to a spatial resolution of 1000 km at an hourly time scale. The error in recovered daily global mean irradiance is 0.16 W m-2 and -0.13 W m-2, and the estimated uncertainty in recovered hourly global mean irradiance from this day is 0.45 W m-2 and 0.15 W m-2, in the shortwave and longwave spectral regions, respectively. Sensitivity tests show that addressing instrument-related issues that lead to systematic measurement error remains of central importance to achieving similar accuracies in reality. The presented error statistics therefore likely represent the lower bounds of what could currently be achieved with the constellation approach, but this study demonstrates the promise of an unprecedented sampling capability for better observing the Earth’s radiation budget.
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机译:来自卫星群的新的,可行的和可持续的观测策略已经引起了许多科学界的极大关注。然而,尚未探索使用这种策略监测全球地球向外辐射的潜力。为了评估这种星座概念的潜力,并调查以足以解决天气和气候研究日周期的时间分辨率测量辐射的配置要求,我们开发了一种新的恢复方法并进行了一系列模拟实验。以理想化的宽视场宽带辐射计为例,我们发现,由36颗卫星组成的基线星座可以在一个小时尺度上以1000 km的空间分辨率可靠地监视全球地球向外辐射。每日平均总辐照度恢复的误差为0.16 W m-2和-0.13 W m-2,从这一天开始,每小时全球总平均辐照度的估计不确定性为0.45 W m-2和0.15 W m-2。短波和长波光谱区域。灵敏度测试表明,解决导致系统测量误差的与仪器相关的问题,对于在现实中实现类似的精度仍然至关重要。因此,所提供的误差统计数据很可能代表了星座方法目前可以实现的范围的下限,但是这项研究证明了实现前所未有的采样能力以更好地观测地球辐射预算的希望。
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