Daily Skin temperature 1993-2004


The skin temperature (TS) is the physical temperature of the Earth surface (which can be closer to the canopy top for dense vegetation). The infrared surface brightness temperature (IR emissivity assumed to be unity) is determined at 3-hour intervals since 1983 over the globe every 30km from a combination of polar and geostationary satellite (Rossow and Schiffer, 1999). Two values of TS are reported; one based on the IR clear sky radiances from the 5-day composites and one based on any available clear pixel IR radiances; the former values are a better estimate of TS because the latter values are slightly cloud contaminated by design (Rossow and Garder, 1993). The ISCCP TS values are corrected for non-unit emissivities using a land classification to specify IR emissivities (Zhang, 2004).


To access the dataset, download the IR skin temperatrue (TS)


Each file is one global square map for one day for 12 years. For the documentation and a sample of matlab and fortran code to read the data click Here.

References

  • Rossow, W. B., and L. C. Garder (1993), Validation of ISCCP Cloud Detections, Journal of Climates, 6(12), 2370-2393.

  • Rossow, W. B., and R. A. Schiffer (1999), Advances in understanding clouds from ISCCP Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,, 80(11), 2261-2287.

  • Zhang, Y., W. B. Rossow, A. A. Lacis, V. Oinas, and M. I. Mishchenko (2004), Calculation of radiative fluxes from the surface to top of atmosphere based on ISCCP and other global data sets: Refinements of the radiative transfer model and the input data, Journal of Geophysical Research, 109.