Accuracy of surface heat fluxes from observations of operational satellites

Abstract

Uncertainties in the flux estimates, resulting from the use of bulk method and remotely sensed data are worked out and are presented for individual and total fluxes. These uncertainties in satellite derived fluxes are further compared with uncertainties for same flux values resulting from climatological ship observations. For net satellite derived heat flux varying from 0 to 300 w/m sup(2) the uncertainties were found to be of the order of 50-90 w/m sup(2). For the same range of flux values the possible uncertainties in ground based climatological estimate were from 40 to 80 w/m sup(2). This increase in uncertainties for satellite derived fluxes were found to be due to remote sensing error. By incorporating satellite measured radiance and atmospheric radiative transfer model in the estimation of radiation budget, the total error bar can be reduced to 30-80 w/m sup(2) from 50-90 w/m sup(2), showing that satellite derived heat fluxes are having accuracies better that (or equal to) those of climatological estimates