GERB

Mission Summary

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) instruments, originally developed using funding from ESA and NERC, and now supported by EUMETSAT, are unique in providing dedicated measurements of the Earth’s Radiation Budget (ERB) from geostationary orbit.

NCEO’s role in the mission

There are different products generated from the GERB data, averaging the data over a range of spatial and temporal scales to provide flexibility and ease of use. These include the native resolution GERB Edition 1 top of atmosphere (TOA) RSW and OLR radiances and high resolution (HR) RSW and OLR fluxes presented on a fixed spatial grid at 15 minute resolution. NCEO researchers at Imperial College continue to develop new products to aid the community: most recently delivering tailored datasets specifically designed to facilitate easy comparison with Earth System Model output – the GERB obs4MIPs TOA RSW and OLR products.

Instrument payload

There are four GERB instruments, each one operating on the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) series of satellites. Each instrument provides spectrally integrated measurements of the Earth’s reflected shortwave radiation (RSW) and emitted longwave radiation (OLR) every 15 minutes, primarily over the region covering 60°N to 60°S and 60°E to 60°W. The figure below shows example images constructed from GERB measurements for 12:00 UTC on 1^st June 2008. The high temporal resolution data enable the evolution of RSW and OLR throughout the diurnal cycle to be examined, supporting scientific studies investigating controls on the observed behaviour (e.g. cloud, aerosol) and investigations into how well this behaviour is captured in numerical weather prediction and regional climate models. GERB instruments have been operational since 2004 and are expected to continue to produce data until the late 2020s.