DSCOVR NISTAR: Earth Radiation Budget Time Series from Lagrange-1 Point

Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) National Institute of Standards & Technology Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR) Level 1A Radiance data. The dataset contains a time series of the daytime Earth radiation budget derived from minute-by-minute measurements of reflected sunlight and infrared emission from the entire sunlit face of Earth. The instrument is onboard the NOAA DSCOVR spacecraft located at the Earth-Sun Lagrange-1 point.

Use Cases

• Modeling Earth's radiation budget based on total, shortwave, and longwave radiance measurements.
• Analyzing temporal variations in global energy balance using minute-by-minute time series data.
• Developing or validating angular distribution models (ADMs) for converting radiance to flux using scene-type information.
• Studying the anisotropy of Earth's reflectance and emittance using integrated hemispheric measurements.

Strengths

• Provides integrated measurements of the entire sunlit hemisphere of Earth from a unique vantage point at Lagrange-1.
• Measures absolute irradiance in four broadband channels: total, shortwave, near-infrared, and a photodiode channel.
• Derives fluxes using empirical angular distribution models (ADMs) based on scene types from EPIC composite products.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA DSCOVR Project, likely via NOAA.

Collection Method

Measurements from the NISTAR radiometer onboard the DSCOVR spacecraft.

Time Range

null

Freshness

null

Geography

Global coverage of the sunlit hemisphere of Earth.