Statistics – Methodology
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.a54d..07f&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #A54D-07
Statistics
Methodology
1616 Climate Variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513), 1626 Global Climate Models (3337, 4928), 1632 Land Cover Change, 1650 Solar Variability (7537), 1694 Instruments And Techniques
Scientific paper
Over recent years the debate as to whether climate change is real has largely subsided, however there is still significant controversy over its cause and most importantly the scale of its impact and means of mitigation. Much of the latter relies upon the predictive capabilities of sophisticated, but highly complex models. Such models need globally sampled measurements of a variety of key indicative physical parameters, and in some cases proxies of others, as input data and whilst generally predicting similar things the detail of their outputs in the decadal time scales can be highly variable. Clearly the quality of the input data is crucial to such models. However, since the key indicators of climate change may only vary by a few percent per decade, the absolute accuracy of such data also needs to be very small to allow detection and provide some means of validating/discriminating and improving the models. At the present time, the accuracy of currently measured data from space is rarely, if ever, adequate to meet this requirement. Instead, high risk strategies are developed which rely upon overlapping and renormalizing data sets from consecutive flights of similar instruments to establish a long-term trend. Such a strategy is doomed to failure!. The only means of achieving robust data sets of sufficient quality and accuracy with a guarantee of long term reproducibility sufficient to detect the subtle indicators of climate change and its cause (anthropogenic from natural) is through traceability to SI units. Such traceability needs to be regularly re-established and guaranteed throughout the lifetime of a mission. However, given that most sensors degrade in performance during launch, and most importantly whilst in orbit, this is difficult to achieve with sufficient accuracy, since such sensors cannot easily be retrieved and taken back to a national standards laboratory for recalibration. TRUTHS (Traceable Radiometry Underpinning Terrestrial- and Helio- Studies) is a mission proposal which allows for the first time, direct regular traceability to SI of all optical radiometric quantities: incident solar irradiance (total and spectrally resolved) and reflected solar spectral radiance from the Earth (or Moon) in-orbit with uncertainties small enough to meet the needs of climate. The TRUTHS satellite is in effect a "standards laboratory in orbit" providing regular calibration of its on-board instrumentation using a methodology mimicking that used on the ground directly against an on board primary standard cryogenic radiometer. In addition to making its own measurements of the Earth and Sun its primary objective is to transfer its high accuracy and tracebility to all other in-flight optical EO sensors, through near simultaneous observation of the same targets, e.g. moon, Earth deserts, snow fields etc. In this way providing a means to establish truly global benchmark measurements from all sensors directly traceable to SI both now and in the future. The use of a flexible moving platform facilitates the matching of view angle of different sensors and the use of high spectral and spatial resolution the ability to simulate footprints and spectral bands.
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