CERES Aqua FM4: Monthly Gridded Radiative Fluxes and Cloud Data

CERES Aqua FM4 Edition 2B is a monthly gridded data product from NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System. It contains regional averages of instantaneous radiative fluxes at the top-of-atmosphere, surface, and atmospheric profile levels, along with cloud parameters, binned by 1-degree spatial regions and observation hour. The data collection is complete, originating from the CERES FM4 instrument launched on the Aqua satellite on May 4, 2002.

Use Cases

• Modeling Earth's radiation budget based on top-of-atmosphere, surface, and in-atmosphere flux data.
• Analyzing cloud-climate feedbacks based on cloud parameters and cloud height categories.
• Validating climate model outputs against observed regional and hourly averaged radiative fluxes.
• Studying diurnal cycles of radiation and clouds based on data sorted by Universal Time hour.

Strengths

• Data is spatially gridded at a 1-degree resolution, providing regional consistency.
• Includes cloud properties sorted into four defined atmospheric height categories.
• Provides statistics for both clear-sky and total-sky scenes.
• Part of a long-running NASA EOS program with a documented instrument lineage.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data represents averages for satellite overpass hours only, not continuous temporal coverage.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Collected by the CERES Scanner and Flight Model 4 (FM4) instrument on the Aqua satellite platform, processed into monthly gridded averages.

Time Range

Coverage corresponds to the operational period of the Aqua FM4 instrument; specific start and end dates are not provided.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 05:04:18.618819; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global coverage, binned into 1-degree spatial regions.