Lab: The Earth's Radiation Budget

Lab: The Earth's Radiation Budget, Part I.

Summary / Purpose

This lab has two purposes:

To get you comfortable with physical experiments and to use experiments to increase your understanding of physical concepts.
To get you familiar with actual datasets used in climate research.

We will do two physical experiments with a light source and solar cells to attempt to crudely replicate the Earth-Sun shortwave radiation system. These are simple experiments but even the most simple experiments help with building intuitive understanding of physical concepts.

The data we will be using comes from satellite. The satellite has measured a number of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and we will use these data to help us understand how the earth receives and transmits radiation back to space. We will explore why temperature varies with latitude and season. We will further explore how different properties of the earth's surface effect the incoming and outgoing radiation. We will first use data that is taken where there are no clouds (clear sky data) and next week we will explore the influence of clouds (Total).

References

The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment.
The NASA Educational Resources website - the Trading Card page (click on Earth's radiation budget).
JPL Quick-Look at ERBS site.
A NASA Fact Sheet on ERBE.