Natural variability and sampling errors in solar strongradiationstrong.pdfVIP

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, D15S19, doi:10.1029/2004JD005028, 2005 Natural variability and sampling errors in solar radiation measurements for model validation over the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains region Zhanqing Li,1 M. C. Cribb, and Fu-Lung Chang Department of Meteorology, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, Maryland, USA Alexander Trishchenko and Yi Luo Applications Division, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Received 17 May 2004; revised 29 November 2004; accepted 21 December 2004; published 26 April 2005. [1] Ground-based radiation measurements are frequently used for validating the performance of a model in simulating clouds. Such important questions are often raised as: (1) How well do the measurements represent model grid mean values?; (2) How much of model-observation differences can be attributed to inherent sampling errors?; and (3) What scale does modeling need to be performed in order to capture the cloud variation? We attempt to address these questions using surface solar irradiance data retrieved from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and measured at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) site. The satellite retrievals are used to mimic ground measurements with various spatial densities and temporal frequencies, from which the sampling errors of the ground observations are quantified and characterized. Most of the differences between point-specific measurements and area-mean satellite retrievals originate from ground sampling errors. We quantify these errors for different months, model grid sizes, and integration intervals. In March 2000, for example, the sampling error is 16 W m2 for instantaneous irradiances 2 2 averaged over an area