NEWS20150701

Observing at-surface irradiance and albedo from space: the Tibet experiment

Laure ROUPIOZ

Abstract Monitoring the solar radiation budget on a daily basis is a prerequisite to study land surface processes, especially in climatology and hydrology. As part of the ceop-aegis project studying the hydrology of the Tibetan Plateau, this thesis focuses on developing a method to adequately estimate at-surface daily solar radiation budget over this particular area. A radiation budget time series produced based on existing satellite data products highlights the necessity to consider terrain and clouds sub-pixel variability when working over heterogeneous areas such as the Tibetan Plateau. The analysis of the impact of spatial and temporal variability of clouds on solar radiation demonstrates that the surface irradiance estimation would benefit from using cloud distribution instead of cloud fraction and the significance of high temporal resolution. A new sub-pixel topographic correction method is proposed and shows that using high resolution digital elevation model improves the irradiance as well as the albedo retrieval. Two approaches are proposed to improve solar radiation budget estimates taking into account adequately the sub-pixel heterogeneity.

Keywords : Radiation budget, Irradiance, Albedo, Topography, Clouds