Comparative Assessment of Satellite-Retrieved Surface Net Radiation: An Examination on CERES and SRB Datasets in China

Surface net radiation plays an important role in land–atmosphere interactions. The net radiation can be retrieved from satellite radiative products, yet its accuracy needs comprehensive assessment. This study evaluates monthly surface net radiation generated from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) and the Surface Radiation Budget project (SRB) products, respectively, with quality-controlled radiation data from 50 meteorological stations in China for the period from March 2000 to December 2007. Our results show that surface net radiation is generally overestimated for CERES (SRB), with a bias of 26.52 W/m2 (18.57 W/m2) and a root mean square error of 34.58 W/m2 (29.49 W/m2). Spatially, the satellite-retrieved monthly mean of surface net radiation has relatively small errors for both CERES and SRB at inland sites in south China. Substantial errors are found at northeastern sites for two datasets, in addition to coastal sites for CERES. Temporally, multi-year averaged monthly mean errors are large at sites in western China in spring and summer, and in northeastern China in spring and winter. The annual mean error fluctuates for SRB, but decreases for CERES between 2000 and 2007. For CERES, 56% of net radiation errors come from net shortwave (NSW) radiation and 44% from net longwave (NLW) radiation. The errors are attributable to environmental parameters including surface albedo, surface water vapor pressure, land surface temperature, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) of land surface proxy, OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2015, 7 4900 and visibility for CERES. For SRB, 65% of the errors come from NSW and 35% from NLW radiation. The major influencing factors in a descending order are surface water vapor pressure, surface albedo, land surface temperature, NDVI, and visibility. Our findings offer an insight into error patterns in satellite-retrieved surface net radiation and should be valuable to improving retrieval accuracy of surface net radiation. Moreover, our study on radiation data of China provides a case example for worldwide validation.