Recent Changes in Earth’s Energy Budget As Observed By CERES

A central objective of the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) is to produce a long-term climate data record of Earth’s radiation budget at the top-of-atmosphere, within-atmosphere and surface together with coincident cloud, aerosol and surface properties. CERES relies on a number of data sources, including broadband CERES radiometers on Terra, Aqua, and Suomi-NPP, high-resolution spectral imagers (MODIS and VIIRS), geostationary visible/infrared imagers, meteorological, aerosol and ozone assimilation data, and snow/sea-ice maps based on microwave radiometer data. The many input data sets are integrated and cross-calibrated to provide a consistent climate data record that accurately captures variations in Earth’s radiation budget and associated cloud, aerosol and surface properties over a range of time and space scales. The CERES datasets are primarily used for climate model evaluation, process studies and climate monitoring.

This presentation will review some of the ways in which the CERES record along with other datasets have been used to improve our understanding Earth’s energy budget. At the top-of-atmosphere, we will show how Earth’s energy imbalance, a critical indictor of climate change, has varied during the past 15 years relative to what is observed by in-situ observations of ocean heat content by the Argo observing system. We will use these results to place the so-called global warming hiatus into a larger context that takes Earth’s energy budget into account. We will also discuss how recent advances in surface radiation budget estimation by the CERES group is reshaping the debate on why the surface energy budget cannot be closed to better than 15 Wm^-2 using state-of-the-art observations. Finally, we will highlight the dramatic changes that have been observed by CERES over the Arctic Ocean, and discuss some of the yet unresolved observational challenges that limit our ability document change in this unique part of the planet.