Abstract To derive top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes from measurements of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) scanning radiometers, it is necessary to convert radiance observations to fluxes. Two key steps of the ERBE radiance-to-flux conversion are the identification of the scene being viewed and the application of an angular model for the particular scene. In this study, the ERBE algorithm is applied to the Nimbus-7 earth radiation budget (ERB) scanner data for June 1979 to analyze the performance of this inversion method in deriving top-of-atmosphere albedos and longwave radiative fluxes. The performance is assessed by comparing ERBE algorithm results with appropriate results derived using the sorting-by-angular-bins (SAB) method, the ERB MATRIX algorithm, and the “new-cloud ERB” (NCLE) algorithm. Comparisons are made for top-of-atmosphere albedos, longwave fluxes, viewing zenith-angle dependence of derived albedos and longwave fluxes, and cloud fractional coverage. Using the SAB method as a ...
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