CERES Data – Increase with that?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I do a very large percentage of my work using CERES data. What is CERES? From them website:

The climate is controlled by the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth and the amount of infrared energy emitted into space. These quantities – along with their differences – determine the Earth’s radiation budget (ERB). The Earth Radiant Energy System and Clouds (CERES) project provides satellite-based observations of the ERB and clouds. It uses measurements from CERES instruments flying on several satellites along with data from many others to create a comprehensive set of ERB data products for climate, weather and applied science research. use.

The data includes a number of individual data sets about things like the amount of sunlight reflected by the earth, solar energy coming from the sun, longwave waves rising from the surface, and a bunch of other data.

Each dataset is a month-by-month record based on a 1° latitude x 1° longitude cell of a given quantity.

While this is fine, it’s for large datasets. Each different dataset is 16,329,600 individual data points…

Also, they are only available in .netcdf format. This is a great format because it can hold all sorts of metadata and data set specifications… but it’s not easy to read.

Now I use the computer language “R” to work with this data. But for most people, this is not an option.

So today, I decided to provide, not grid data, but monthly averages of grid data. I split it into two Excel documents (.xlsx). One is a monthly record of the full data for the variable and the other is a monthly record of the rest of the data, what remains after seasonal variations are removed. Data covers March 2000 to February 2021. In each Excel file, I provide global, northern and southern hemisphere data. This results in the following:

So you have it. Links to the data are below. Explore it, let us know what you find. If you have questions, askem, and most of all…

… interesting.

w.

Full data: CERES 2000 2021.xlsx . data

Remaining data: CERES 2000 2021 data Residual.xlsx