News

It’s not just rising air and water temperatures influencing the decades-long decline of Arctic sea ice. Clouds, aerosols, even the bumps and dips on the ice itself can play a role. To explore how these factors interact and impact sea ice melting, NASA is flying two aircraft equipped with scientific instruments over the Arctic Ocean … Read the rest ⇢

Three long-running satellites will soon be switched off, forcing scientists to figure out how to adjust their views of our changing planet. When the three orbiters — Terra, Aqua and Aura — are powered down, much of the data they’ve been collecting will end with them, and newer satellites won’t pick up all of the … Read the rest ⇢

The NASA GLOBE Clouds team at NASA Langley Research Center receives over 200k citizen science sky observations each year. When a GLOBE cloud observation is taken within 15 minutes of a satellite observation, both points of view are coupled, creating a match. Some satellites are geostationary satellites, such as GOES, Himawari, and Meteosat. Others are … Read the rest ⇢

An essay written by John Aber, a retired professor at the University of New Hampshire: “I am constantly amazed by our technological prowess in measuring the state of the climate system. Accumulating long-term data on key processes in the weather/climate machine with rigorously validated methods is essential to understanding our climate future. It’s also a … Read the rest ⇢

Researchers have found that Earth’s energy imbalance approximately doubled during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019. Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun’s radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits to space. A positive energy … Read the rest ⇢

With the launch of NASA’s Terra Satellite Earth Observing System on Dec. 18, 1999, and subsequent ‘first light’ of the Cloud’s and the Earth’s Energy Radiant System (CERES) instrument on February 26, 2000, NASA gave birth to what ultimately would become the first long-term global observational record of Earth’s energy balance. This key indicator of … Read the rest ⇢

December 18, 2020 marks 20 years since the launch of two instruments that have changed the way scientists study climate.After more than 20 years in space, the five instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite continue their singular achievement of compiling a climate data record of Earth.+ For more information please visit:https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/articles/terra-at-20

December 18, 2020 marks 20 years since the launch of two instruments that have changed the way scientists study climate.The first two Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments (Flight Model [FM] 1 and FM2) launched aboard the Terra satellite Dec. 18, 1999, following the launch of the CERES proto-flight model (PFM) on … Read the rest ⇢

The Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program’s Fall Cloud Observation Challenge, led by the Science Education team at NASA Langley, took place from Oct 15 – Nov 15, 2019 and asked citizen scientists to report cloud and sky conditions. The challenge brought in more than 45,000 observations from citizen scientists in … Read the rest ⇢

Our planet’s climate may be more sensitive to increases in greenhouse gas than we realized, according to a new generation of global climate models being used for the next major assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The findings – which run counter to a 40-year consensus – are a troubling sign that … Read the rest ⇢

The CERES team announces the release of Edition 4.1 of the Energy Balanced and Filled (EBAF) data product. EBAF Ed4.1 leverages off of the many algorithm improvements that have been made in the Edition 4 suite of CERES level 1-3 data products.This initial release covers the period March 2000 – January 2019. Additional months will … Read the rest ⇢

A new measurement validation site for Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) was installed on Granite Island, Michigan in Lake Superior on June 11-21, 2018. Bryan Fabbri and Fred Denn (Science Systems and Applications, Inc.) facilitated the installation. Granite Island will be used for surface validation of satellites (such as CERES).From space, aerosols … Read the rest ⇢

The Earth Radiation Budget Science Team publicly released the first data products for the CERES Flight Model 6 (FM6) instrument on JPSS/NOAA-20 on June 13, 2018. The Edition1 – Calibration / Validation is the team’s first release of CERES data products using on-orbit calibration coefficients based on initial characterization of the instrument. This release provides … Read the rest ⇢

Norman Loeb presents First Light on NASA’s Newest Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System. Originally presented at the Fall AGU 2017 conference on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 11:45 a.m.+ View the video: here

It’s working!The covers on the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System Flight Model 6 (CERES FM6) opened Jan. 5, allowing it to scan Earth for the first time.The instrument was one of five that launched Nov. 18, 2017, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration’s (NOAA) Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). After reaching polar … Read the rest ⇢

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Joint Polar Satellite System-1 (JPSS-1) blasted off the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast 1:47 a.m. PST (4:47 a.m. EST) Saturday, Nov. 18. On the NOAA satellite were five science instruments, including the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System Flight Model 6 (CERES … Read the rest ⇢

The Earth’s energy budget is a complicated thing.But understanding how much of the sun’s energy hits the planet and where, how much energy the planet emits back, and the key role clouds play in that process is crucial to studying the complex processes that fuel our weather and climate, ocean currents and the interplay of … Read the rest ⇢

The Earth and its interconnected systems have always been a fascination for Norman Loeb. “It’s quite an interesting thing when you think about how energy is distributed and exchanged in various forms amongst Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land and snow surfaces”, he said.As the principal investigator of NASA’s Radiaton Budget Science Project, Loeb oversees a series … Read the rest ⇢

The CERES team announces the release of the Edition4A SYN1deg data product suite. This includes TOA, surface and atmospheric radiative fluxes and cloud, aerosol and surface properties at 1×1 deg regional, 1 deg zonal and global spatial resolutions, and the following temporal resolutions: hourly (SYN1deg-1Hour), 3-hourly (SYN1deg-3Hour), daily (SYN1deg-Day), monthly (SYN1deg-Month) and monthly in hourly … Read the rest ⇢

Release of Level 3 Edition4 TOA Radiation Budget dataset from ERBS WFOV Nonscanner ObservationsThe ERBE team announces the release of Level 3 Edition4 top-of-atmosphere (TOA) irradiance data products from Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) wide-field-of-view (WFOV) nonscanner observations. The Edition4 dataset is available from January 1985 to December 1998. This task is made possible by … Read the rest ⇢