Release of the CM SAF Land Flux CDR: a joint retrieval of the full surface radiance budget, latent and sensible heat

For the first time, the CM SAF releases a simultaneous retrieval of the full land surface radiation balance and heat fluxes for geostationary sensors. This regional Land Flux climate data record (CDR) consists of a multi-decadal, hourly resolved set of land radiation, latent and sensible heat fluxes as well as cloud fractional cover which complement the CM SAF top of atmosphere radiation fluxes and enable a surface to atmosphere radiation and water balance analysis over land for the Meteosat disk back to 1983.

These figures show the multi-yearly averages (1983 – 2020) of the Latent (left) and Sensible (right) Heat Fluxes (W m-2). Source: CM SAF

The Land Flux CDR was achieved by consolidating and unifying previously separated developments in the CM SAF and LSA SAF und running them in a joint retrieval. The single components of the surface radiation budget i.e., solar radiation, albedo, surface downwelling and outgoing thermal radiation, are derived from the thermal and optical channels of the MVIRI and SEVIRI instruments onboard the geostationary Meteosat satellites. All implemented algorithms are physical retrieval schemes making full use of the new inter-calibrated Meteosat observations (John et al. 2019). Surface latent and sensible heat fluxes are obtained using an adapted version of the LSA SAF land surface model (Gihlain et al. 2012). The radiation components of the surface radiation budget are taken as input to the land surface model, while soil moisture and meteorological inputs are adapted from ERA5 dataset. The Land Flux CDR is complemented with the cloud fraction, labelled as COMET CDR, obtained from the joint retrieval.

The data are available from 1983 to 2020 as hourly, daily, monthly samples and as monthly diurnal cycle composites. They cover the region ±65° longitude and ±65° latitude on a 0.05° x 0.05° regular grid.

The climate data record can be ordered via the Web User Interface. More information on the data record is available from the DOI page: http://dx.doi.org/10.5676/EUM_SAF_CM/SLF_METEOSAT/V001

Ghilain, N., Arboleda, A., Sepulcre-Canto, G., Batelaan, O., Ardo, J., & Gellens-Meulenberghs, F. (2012). Improving evapotranspiration in a land surface model using biophysical variables derived from MSG/SEVIRI satellite, doi:10.5194/hess-16-2567-2012

John, V.O., Tabata, T., Rüthrich, F., Roebeling, R., Hewison, T., Stöckli, R., Schulz, J. On the Methods for Recalibrating Geostationary Longwave Channels Using Polar Orbiting Infrared Sounders. Remote Sens. 2019.

NaS / June2024