Western Hemisphere + web view | + hi-res image Eastern Hemisphere + web view | + hi-res image
A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. + go to feature
The doors are open on NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite and the newest version of the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument is scanning Earth for the first time, helping to assure continued availability of measurements of the energy leaving the Earth-atmosphere system.
The CERES results help scientists to determine the Earth’s energy balance, providing a long-term record of this crucial environmental parameter that will be consistent with those of its predecessors.
*** Click either image to enlarge it ***
CERES arrived in space Oct. 28, 2011, carried by NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite, the recently renamed Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense.
Instrument cover-opening activities began on the instrument at 10:12 a.m. Eastern time Jan. 26, an operation that took about three hours. The “first light” process represented the transition from engineering checkout to science observations. The next morning CERES began taking Earth-viewing data, and on Jan. 29 scientists produced an image from the scans.
“It’s extremely gratifying to see the CERES FM-5 instruments on Suomi NPP begin taking measurements. We’re continuing the legacy of the most accurate Earth radiation budget observations ever made,” said CERES project scientist Kory Priestley, of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
“It has taken an incredible team of engineers, scientists, data management and programmatic experts to get CERES to this point,” he said.
NASA instruments have provided the scientific community unprecedented observations of the Earth’s climate and energy balance for nearly 30 years. The first CERES instrument was launched in 1997. Before that, the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) did the job beginning in 1984.
Langley Research Center has led both the ERBE and CERES experiments and provided stewardship of these critical climate observations.
For 27 years without a break, the instruments collectively have returned a vast quantity of precise data about the solar energy reflected and absorbed by Earth, the heat the planet emits, and the role of clouds in that process.
“CERES monitors minute changes in the Earth’s energy budget, the difference between incoming and outgoing energy,” said CERES principal investigator Norman Loeb, of Langley Research Center.
“Any imbalance in Earth’s energy budget due to increasing concentrations of heat trapping gases warms the ocean, raises sea level, and causes increases in atmospheric temperature,” Loeb said. “Amassing a long record of data is important in order to understand how Earth’s climate is changing in response to human activities as well as natural processes.”
How It Works
In addition to observing changes in Earth’s radiation budget, scientists are also monitoring changes in clouds and aerosols, which strongly influence Earth’s radiation budget.
“Clouds both reflect sunlight and block energy from radiating to space,” Loeb said. “Which of these two effects dominates depends upon the properties of clouds, such as their amount, thickness and height.”
“As the Earth’s environment evolves, cloud properties may change in ways that could amplify or offset climate change driven by other processes. Understanding the influence of clouds on the energy budget is therefore a critical climate problem.”
The four other CERES instruments are in orbit on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites.
Overall Mission
The five-instrument suite on Suomi NPP collects and distributes remotely sensed land, ocean, and atmospheric data to the meteorological and global Earth system science research communities. The mission will provide atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, humidity sounding, land and ocean biological productivity, cloud and aerosol properties, total/profile ozone measurements, and monitor changes in the Earth’s radiation budget.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Suomi mission for the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program provides the satellite ground system and NOAA provides operational support. Suomi NPP commissioning activities are expected to be completed by March.
NASA Langley manages the CERES experiment with additional contracted support from Science Systems and Applications, Inc. The TRW Space & Electronics Group in Redondo Beach, Calif., now owned by Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, built all of the CERES instruments.
MORE INFORMATION
› Q&A With CERES Principal Investigator
Michael Finneran
NASA Langley Research Center
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Everyone should note how CERES explodes the idea of modeling the Earth’ energy budget as a homogenous black or grey body. Also, NASA built the S/C, NPOESS (now JPSS) is in charge of the program. The original “N” in NPP was for NPOESS.
FWIW
The images are from a perspective of ~7900 miles or approximately one radius above the surface, sketch it yourself and see how much of a sphere you’ll see.
A physicist says:
February 4, 2012 at 8:05 am
… something… something… next 30 years… big list… lotsa typing…
Obviously it will be necessary for all the civilian space scientists in the world, and every space-faring military agency too, to collaborate in the Hansen-affirming conspiracy of coming decades. To say nothing of all the ground-based scientists who will have to be recruited, indoctrinated, and coordinated too!
… something… on and on…”
==================================================================
Massive conspiracy needed? According to the Climategate 1.0 release it only took one programmer to fudge the data. Obviously fudging data does not take a massive conspiracy.
Said by Alberta Slim: “Does that mean that Hansen is going to be allowed to “adjust” the results to his liking??”
Yes, and it means Taxpayers just funded another “Toy” for Hansen play with.
GOES East and West show good images of clouds from far away (geostationary satellite):
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEIR.JPG
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GWVS.JPG
GOES Full Disk page is at http://www.goes.noaa.gov/goesfull.html
“Clouds both reflect sunlight and block energy from radiating to space,” Loeb said. “Which of these two effects dominates depends upon the properties of clouds, such as their amount, thickness and height.”
How can they still be so vague, when the data is so obvious:
Over the tropics, clouds reflect 500-1000W shortwave, while blocking 100-300W infrared.
They could easily quantify it over the entire globe and see that the net effect of more clouds has to be cooling.
Bernd Felsche says:
February 4, 2012 at 7:36 am
Cool question! The answer is not infinite, as the Earth’s atmosphere refracts light some a bit (so at sunrise and sunset, the Sun’s upper limb is actually below the horizon by a fraction of a degree). Hmm, I lost my memory of the refraction amount, I could dig it out of my program that computes sunrise/sunset times,
I’ll figure it out some day.
METEOSAT shows Europe and Africa, also from some 35,800 Km of altitude:
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/f_meteo.html
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GMIR.JPG (IR)
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GMVS.JPG (VIS)
@mkelly said: “Suomi means Finnish. So why is it called “Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP.”
Not to be pedantic, but actually Suomi means Finland in the Finnish language.
Richard M says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:34 am
Of course its a fake – what electronic astronomical photo hasn’t gone through a huge amount of processing?
In this particular case, please check out http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/viirs-globe-east.html and list in detail each item of fakery and explain why it should not have been done.
Then explain why the raw field of view, just a scan of a line sweeping across the surface of the Earth under the satellite’s track, would be the One True Way to display the data. Include comments on how contrast and color should be processed to create the strip.
From the web page:
The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere ‘Blue Marble’ is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 kilometers). NASA scientist Norman Kuring managed to ‘step back’ from Earth to get the big picture by combining data from six different orbits of the Suomi NPP satellite. Or putting it a different way, the satellite flew above this area of Earth six times over an eight hour time period. Norman took those six sets of data and combined them into one image.
Using a basketball you can get a good idea of how far away the Suomi NPP satellite is from Earth. Take a basketball that has a diameter of 10 inches (about 25 centimeters) and say that’s ‘Earth.’ (For the record, Earth has a diameter of about 7,926 miles (about 12,756 kilometers)).
So to get the same view of Earth as the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite, hold the basketball five-eighth of an inch (about one-and-a-half centimeters) away from your face.
The actual swath width of the Earth’s surface covered by each pass of VIIRS as the satellite orbits the Earth is about 1,865 miles (about 3,001 kilometers). On the basketball that’s about two and one-third inches (about six centimeters).
iya says:
February 4, 2012 at 8:52 am
Yes, a very graphic illustration that modulation of incoming short wave solar radiation by the reflectivity of clouds dominates modulation of outgoing long wave radiation by clouds.
Amazing assumption, that the areas under the clouds are not orange because the clouds are blocking heat from leaving the earth.
More likely they are not orange because the clouds are blocking the heat from the sun reaching the earth. Only those areas without clouds are able to heat up and show the orange color.
The problem is that climate science assumes albedo is 0.3, which is a nonsense of averaging. Since radiation is a 4th power function, this leads to a huge error in the energy calculations.
A physicist says:
February 4, 2012 at 8:05 am
Obviously it will be necessary for all the civilian space scientists in the world, and every space-faring military agency too, to collaborate in the Hansen-affirming conspiracy of coming decades.
Those who were alive at the time will recall the shift in NASA policy shortly after the moon landings. From studying space NASA changed to studying “near earth”. Every year a case had to be made for the money spent. Saving the earth was the obvious choice.
No conspiracy was required. Simple budget pressure. It was all too easy to say we should not be spending money on space with all the problems back home. The bigger the problems at home, the more budget money it attracted. The more money the problem attracted, the more incentive to paint the picture larger and larger to keep the funding flowing.
In the end funding, not CO2 is the true driver of AGW and climate change. For every doubling in funding, we have seen an increase of 0.6-3.0C in projected warming. That is called the climate sensitivity. Now that funding is decreasing, the projections for warming are also decreasing as a result.
ferd berple says:
February 4, 2012 at 10:28 am
“In the end funding, not CO2 is the true driver of AGW and climate change. For every doubling in funding, we have seen an increase of 0.6-3.0C in projected warming. That is called the climate sensitivity. Now that funding is decreasing, the projections for warming are also decreasing as a result”
Indeed! Cause and effect.
Ric Werme – please explain how a basketball viewed from 1.5cm would look like a globe.
These are beautiful images, but I ask you, “What’s missing?”
Night.
(Kudos to Bernd Felsche @ur momisugly 11:59 for the catch.)
The maps are color coded in W/m2. Really?
At a single point in time? No. Half the map should be night.
Is it a 24 hr average heat flux? First off, it should say so. Secondly, the second image (reflected incoming solar energy) peaks at 1063 W/m2. Considering that the maximum solar incidence is 1363 +/- 4 W/m2, 1063 W/m2 that cannot be squared with a 24 hr average anywhere on the planet.
My best guess is that these maps are readings at local solar noon, and therefore speak to less than 10% of the energy flux during the entire day. But it is a guess, because I don’t see the basis stated here.
Is the time frame for the second and third map the same? It is implied so. The cloud patterns look like they are within hours if not minutes of each other.
These maps are playing right into the wrong headed approach of “divide solar insolation by 4” to study climate. A day-night cycle is essential for a temperature lapse rate in the atmosphere.
The maps will make great wall paper. But don’t bet the farm on what the number mean just yet.
John Trigge – those aren’t hemispheric images. that’s obvious to all by now but it’s ben impossible to convince the WUWT crew to change their misleading caption.
If, as Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says, “Remember those pictures are composites and the satellite always transits at around 1pm local time.”, how are they measuring and accounting for the ‘balance’ from the night side of the Earth whilst measuring the day side? Nothing incoming at night but wouldn’t there be a lot of outgoing energy?
As there are heat sources other than the sun on/in the Earth (e.g. volcanoes, industry), is this included in the ‘balance’? Or is the focus of this still to denigrate heat-trapping gases as per:
“Any imbalance in Earth’s energy budget due to increasing concentrations of heat trapping gases warms the ocean, raises sea level, and causes increases in atmospheric temperature,” Loeb said.
And, where is Australia in the hemispheric images? I’m feeling lost and left out.
The pictures of the western and eastern hemispheres …is the gulf of Mexico really that large? Why would there be distortions from a photograph?
A physicist says:
February 4, 2012 at 8:05 am
###
Sure, if you stomp on the data hard enough. RE dis-GRACE!
Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:
February 4, 2012 at 11:23 am
It’s hard to get your eye that low, and the view would be a lot more useful if you used a basketball-sized globe. I assume the basketball reference was because the basketball is a standard size.
A better comparision is to the International Space Station (ISS). Note that “The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers).” The ISS is only 250 mile/400 km up. Photos from there are adequate to show an entire large hurricane, but not enough to see the entire USA without several orbits over it. You’ve seen many photos from the ISS – you can see the curvature of the Earth and can infer that the Earth is indeed something close to a sphere.
Recall:
So if you could look at a 25 cm globe from 1.5 cm above it, you could see the curvature of the horizion very easily. BTW, if you bring a straightedge (the exit information card works fine!) on a commercial flight, and hold it on the window so it appears tangent to the horizon, you can see that the horizon is curved. 10 km is 2.5% percent of the way up to ISS height. Not much, but enough.
A few decades ago when my father was planning a house in Plymouth, New Hampshire, we wanted to know what kind of view there would be, in particular, if we could see Mt Washington, the highest mountain in the American northeast. Besides the obvious tree climbing, I used a small telescope and a plastic relief USGS topgraphic map to try to get a sense of what we would see. I concluded we probably couldn’t see Mt. Washington, and it turned out to me the case. Someone who lived a couple hundred feet higher can see it, so we were close.
Something like a dental inspection mirror is a good way to get a view, but the telescope and tripod provided a view that was easier to share.
Thank you Ric. That much, I understand. But still, in no way even a reconstruction of multiple passes would make America look like it’s occupying the whole hemisphere of a globe (apologies for not having made that clear, in my reply above).
Take for example this pic of the ISS, and Earth with Italy, likely taken from a Space Shuttle
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-118/hires/s118e09467.jpg
Italy occupies a large part of the picture, still the perspective gives away the fact that Italy is a tiny piece of the larger Earth, that more than a “marble” looks like a giant ball one’s flying very close to.
This is all missing from the America picture above, that is more likely to be seen as a fish-eye look out of a satellite’s camera. Note how the construction of the Africa picture, where the distortion is minimal (a true picture would have shown Antarctica, I suspect), is explained in detail at NASA’s site, and the America one not at all.
ps glad to see we agree that the caption is wrong
Oh – I forgot to mention – the perspective of the eastern image is is what you would see if you were about 8,000 miles (one Earth diameter) above the Eastern Hemisphere (Madagascar to be more precise). In basketball-sized globes, that would correspond to the view you’d see from 10 in/ 25 cm away.
So you can see a whole continent, but not a whole hemisphere.
LazyTeenager says:
February 4, 2012 at 5:29 am
I’ll also wager that IR fluorescence life times are too long compared to the gas kinetic collision rates and so any radiation absorbed by a CO2 molecule is transferred to the bath gas instead of being immediately reemitted.
;—————————————————————————
This occurs for the asymmetric stretch of CO2 at 4 microns – and not for the wagging of CO2 in and out of the plane at 15 microns.
And the fluorescence only occurs between CO2-CO2 collisions with an extremely small efficiency.
Note, nitrogen absorption occurs around 4 microns as a result collision induced absorption (where the collision induces the dipole moment.)
In fact, rotational collision induced absorptions by oxygen and nitrogen are important mechanisms in the atmosphere (given their relative abundance.)
A physicist on Feb 4th at 1.19a.m.
that was an excellent link to the You Tube video from Cerro Paranal. I live about another 20 degrees south of that latitude so those views are the ones that we enjoy from here over the course of a year. The central bulge of the Milky Way rising and setting is something that you have to travel south of the equator to really appreciate. So too the Magellanic Clouds seen in several sequences circling the south celestial pole in a clockwise fashion.
The part that is of real relevance to this thread are the images revealing the sub-visual clouds seen streaking across the bottom of several of the fields of view. The clouds aren’t visible to the naked-eye but can be detected with long exposures on film or digital cameras. They show up orange in colour, not because of man-made light pollution but because they are so high that they are still getting the last incidences of sunlight refracting onto them well after the end of astronomical twilight.
I first encountered the sub-visual clouds back in May 2004 whilst photgraphing one of the two Duelling (naked-eye) Comets that were in our sky at the time, C/2002 T7 LINEAR. In what looked to be a clear sky the camera recorded bands of orange cloud across the area where the comet sat. This high cloud preceeded an approaching front but was too thin to be recorded on IR satelitte images over New Zealand at the time.
Being an amateur astronomer I have more than a casual interest in cloud cover. I have notoiced that even the best satelitte images, obviously manipulated, don’t give the complete story as far as clouds are concerned.
In my part of N.Z. we have just had our 6th worst January for cloud, and February has started with 5 hours sunshine in 5 days! There seems to be something about Great Comets in our sky that attracts bad cloud cover. The worst January in the 84 year record for here was when Comet McNaught graced our skies in 2007, and now we have just had Comet Lovejoy’s brilliant traverse of the south celestial pole coincide with more cloud than we prefer! Correlation is not causation so I won’t blame the comets. It would be nice if things would return to the situation we had for Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp in ’96 & ’97!
For my location in N.Z. 2011 had the least sunshine hours for any year since the Pinatubo affected years of 1991-2-3. Is anyone doing a study on the influence of the Chilean Volcano Puyehue on the the southern hemisphere? I know that Puyehue’s output was nothing compared to Pinatubo, and the type of eruption was also very different, but the amount of material that I recorded in the lower atmoosphere back during our winter must have had some effect?
Cheers,
Coops
“”””” Doug Cotton says:
February 4, 2012 at 12:01 am
George E. Smith; says:
February 3, 2012 at 10:20 pm
George, you make good points about the clouds blocking incident solar radiation. In fact carbon dioxide and methane etc do likewise, thus having a cooling effect. (I will no longer call these GHG.)
But any radiation from either water vapour or carbon dioxide etc (which are at significantly colder temperatures than the surface) will have a lower peak frequency than the peak frequency being emitted by the warmer surface. (Wien’s Displacement Law says peak frequency is proportional to absolute temperature.) “””””
Well Doug, I have pointed out in the past that H2O, O3, and CO2 ; all GHGs do have significant absorption bands in the incoming solar energy spectrum. The water ones are most prominent beginning somewhere in the 700-750 nm region, and continuing out beyond 4.0 microns.
For a 6,000 Kelvin black body source, peaking at about 500 nm (Wien law) 98% of the energy lies between 250 nm (peak/2), and 4.0 microns (8 x peak), with just 1% beyond each end.
Now for the solar TSI, it is not really tru BB by the time you get to the surface, since the UV end of the spectrum is somewhat BB anomalous, and a lot of that 250 nm region solar energy doesn’t reach the ground, because of O3, and O2 as well.
CO2 has several bands in the solar spectrum, one of which overlaps a water band, at I believe it is 2.17 microns. Now overlaps does not mean coincides.
Phil has pointed out that the detail molecular spectral lines of CO2 and H2O are separate, though the bands overlap.
But it is important to remember that these absorption and emission bands ARE NOT thermal spectra. They are characteristic molecular resonance spectra, and the wavelengths absorbed or emitted are essentially Temperature independent; which is the hallmark of Thermal spectra (Temperature dependence via Wien/Planck) .
The Occupancy of these molecular excited states may be frequency dependent, but the energy levels aren’t so neither are the absorption and emission spectral lines.
Hence LWIR emission downward from the atmosphere, we are told by the “experts” cannot be thermal BB like spectra, that are Wien dependent; they must consist ONLY of the molecular species characteristic resonance lines.
We are told that the atmosphere main gases cannot radiate, so the only radiant emission from the atmosphere, is GHG spectral lines which must be spontaneous emissions from GHG molecules, which got into the excited state via collisions with non-GHG molecules (which are in the majority).
So the downward emission of LWIR from clouds or the atmosphere cannot be Temperature dependent as to the source Temperature; but must depend ONLY on the emitting GHG species.
Well that is if you believe that neutral mono or diatomic (homo) molecules cannot radiate IR Thermal spectra.
I’m NOT a believer of that theory, although I admit, that because gas molecular densities are low, so that the atmosphere isn’t even vaguely a black or gray body (absorber), the absorption/emission per molecule is likely quite low, and it IS a thermal (Temperature depopendent) spectrum, and the fundamental Physical cause is the accelerations of electric charges in the atom/molecule while it is undergoing shape distortion during molecular collisions.
Typical atmospheric main gases have nuclei that are about 3675 times as massive as their electron clouds, sine p/e is 1836, and n/e is 1837 mass ratios, and most of those atoms, have one neutron per proton. So the KE and the momentum is all in the nuclei, which is why the charge distribution must distort while two molecules are in collision governed pretty much by Newtonian dynamics (way sub relativistic velocities in CM space), and ordinary Coulomb repulsion forces. The accelerated charge radiation is a consequence of Maxwell’s equations; likely first described by Heinrich Hertz. So it is classical physics and not quantum mechanics (so I’m told by folks who know much more than I do.
But in any case I do like the idea of a FEEDBACK LOOP where the feedback is applied to the REAL driving source/force which is THE SUN.
Talking about “feedback” via LWIR re-emission to the surface, is like connecting a feedback loop to the dial illumination lamp; or something else that is outside the energy SUPPLY loop.
“”””” Steve Keohane says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:56 am
George E. Smith; says: February 3, 2012 at 10:20 pm
George, many good points I agree with, but I want to step back to something that seems even more fundamental to this energy balance thingy. And I notice erl happ says:February 4, 2012 at 12:45 am touches on it. I too noticed the higher emitting NH as well, combining that with the AMU global temperature plot, is further confirmation of a simple theory that has been bothering me for some time. The max global temperatures occur in July, when the planet is furthest from the sun, least annual energy hitting earth, but the obliquity points the NH is more toward the sun. Therefore, IMO, it seems the most important factor in warming the earth is how much sun hits ground, something with more mass than air, and is not water. The clouds alter what’s coming and going, but it seems that if sunlight doesn’t hit the ground, there is not much to play with. “””””
Steve it seems to me, that the sun, being about a 1/2 degree divergence near point source, ALWAYS illuminates about 1/2 of the earth surface; actually slightly more than one half if you want to get pedantic, because of that 1/2 degree solar angular diameter, and the atmospheric refraction near sunup, and sundown.
The earth could suddenly start rotating about an equatorial axis through zero and 180 degrees, and it wouldn’t make any difference; the sun would still always illuminate a hemisphere.
And as many have noticed, about 70+ % of “The Ground” is actually “The Ocean”.
And if you look where most of the sunlight hits you see there is decidedly more ocean, so I would venture that at least 75% of ALL the solar energy, ends up in the tropical oceans. The absorptance of the oceans is much higher than that of the “Ground”. about 97-98% versus something maybe as low as 50% or less. for the ground.
But the earth (Ocean/ground) must capture the solar energy BEFORE we need to consider how it gets distributed via atmospheric thermal processes and LWIR radiations.