Tropical radiation budget from ERBS scanner measurements

In an effort to attain a quantitative understanding of the temporal and spatial variability of the tropical radiation budgets and the cloud-radiative forcing, a complete annual cycle of measurements by the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite scanning radiometer is analyzed.Results show the existence of strong diurnal variation in the longwave emission over land and desert scenes and in the reflected shortwave radiation for all scenes. A bias in the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment scene identification algorithm against clear tropical scenes at night is evident in the longwave diurnal variation results. Substantial east-west variation is exhibited in the radiation and the cloud forcing components for some latitude zones. The largest seasonal changes in the radiation and the cloud forcing components are associated with the Asian summer monsoon and the migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Cloud forcing results show a strong dependence of net forcing on cloud type, with small values for convective clouds and large negative values for stratiform clouds