Poster PDF

Authors

Gary B. Hodges — Earth System Research Laboratory
Joseph J. Michalsky — NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory/Global Monitoring Division & CU-Boulder/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Category

Instruments

Description

The multifilter radiometer (MFR) mounted in the starboard wing tip of the Cessna 206 operating out of the Ponca City airport has been resurrected. The first flight with valid data occurred on October 27, 2012. As of January 2013 there have been 28 flights. Each flight typically occurs between 1800 UTC and 2100 UTC, with passes over the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Central Facility (CF) lasting about two hours. As with the SGP multifilter rotating shadowband radiometers (MFRSR) and tower-mounted MFRs, the Cessna MFR measures at 415, 500, 615, 673, 870, and 950 nm. In addition to the standard MFR measurements, latitude, longitude and altitude are also recorded. The sampling rate is 1 hz.

In this poster we compare spectral albedo calculated using the Cessna MFR and the SGP extended facility 13 (E13) MFRSR, with albedos calculated from the 10-m and 25-m MFRs located at the Central Facility. As with the Cessna data, the E13 MFRSR is also used for calculating albedo with the CF MFRs. To accomplish this comparison, each pass over the CF is averaged and compared with albedos from the fixed locations. The fixed MFRs and MFRSR sample every 20 seconds. Since we are comparing Cessna data with the CF data, we only use the portion of each pass that is close to the CF.