Retrieval of Daytime Surface Upward Longwave Radiation Under All-Sky Conditions With Remote Sensing and Meteorological Reanalysis Data

Surface upward longwave radiation (SULR) is a key parameter that regulates surface radiation budget balance and matter-energy exchange. However, the state-of-the-art SULR retrieval methods based on remotely sensed data are only effective under clear skies, which mean that the existing methods are unable to generate spatiotemporal continuous SULR product at regional or global scale. Herein, taking the advantage of long-pending abundant ground-based radiation observations, satellite products, and meteorological reanalysis data, a data-driven random forest (RF) method is proposed to retrieve the instantaneous SULR under all-sky conditions. Based on spectral samples of different surface types and simulation results from the moderate resolution atmospheric transmission (MODTRAN), spectral transformation is carried out to transform SULR of various measured domains into the defined 4-100 mu m domain at first. SULR and surface downward shortwave radiation (SDSR) observations from seven stations of the surface radiation budget network (SURFRAD) and nine stations of the baseline surface radiation network (BSRN) are used in model's training and testing procedures, and the RF model achieves a high accuracy with the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 10.45 W/m(2) on test set. In model evaluation, ground measurements from 14 stations of FLUXNET have been used, and the overall RMSE is 18.40 W/m(2). In the actual application process, SDSR is estimated by remotely sensed data of Meteosat Second Generation (MSG). The accuracy of RF model has been validated with the observations from five stations of BSRN in 2021, and RMSEs are 17.00, 10.94, 12.17, 27.89, and 12.54 W/m(2), respectively. Validation result shows that the data-driven method is capable of estimating SULR under all-sky conditions with a high accuracy. Finally, sensitivity analysis has been carried out, and the established RF model keeps robust even though there are great uncertainties among input parameters.

Automated summary

This study proposes a data-driven random forest method for retrieving surface upward longwave radiation (SULR) under all-sky conditions. The method is trained and tested using spectral samples, ground observations, and satellite data, and validated using remote sensing data. The results demonstrate high accuracy in estimating SULR using this method.