NASA CERES Spurious Calibration Drifts Corrected by Lunar Scans to Show the Sun Is not Increasing Global Warming and Allow Immediate CRF Detection

Abstract

There is still much uncertainty surrounding how the Earth will respond to the rapid recent warming that has been observed, due to significant anthropogenic greenhouse gas releases in the last 120 years. The resulting changes to clouds, often referred to as cloud radiative forcing/feedback or CRF (Bony et al., 2006), remains one of the largest unknowns. More specifically, it is unclear if the rapidly arriving warmer Earth will result in more, less, or simply different types of clouds, and whether changes to say their sunlight reflection will diminish or amplify warming (i.e., as a negative or positive climate feedback).The time averaged solar flux of 1,361 2Wm arriving at Earth is currently very stable on decadal length scales, with a slight negative trend of −0.029%/decade in the 2000-2015 timeframe, so cannot by itself be responsible for current rapid surface temperature rises (see Figure 1, LASP, 2021). This work is therefore not an analysis of effects of variation in solar output on climate change (Haigh, 1996), but instead its focus is on changes to remaining planetary solar input after reflection from Earth, defined here as "albedo solar warming" (at first assuming the Solar output flux is completely constant over time). Albedo changes have the potential to be a primary driver of climate change, as they would alter the energy entering Earth from the currently stable Sun. For example, the rise in atmospheric reflectivity due to particulate aerosols emitted from the 1991 Pinatubo volcanic eruption (Soden et al., 2002), led to a temporary global cooling of around half a degree Celsius.Climate scientists and economists estimated that the size of the CRF albedo solar warming/cooling climate signal trends being looked for, are no larger than just under 0.8 2Wm /decade in magnitude (Cooke et al., 2013;Wielicki et al., 2013). This is in terms of changes to fractional Earth reflectivity, multiplied with the incoming solar flux (that averages to 1,361 2Wm with an overhead Sun). Solar flux is measured daily Abstract Orbital Earth Radiation Budget measurement comparisons to models, are critical for climate prediction confidence. Satellite systems must reduce calibration drifts for this purpose. NASA Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) measures Earth albedo reductions that if correct, would increase solar forcing and suggest greater sunlight absorption is driving much of recent temperature increases. Such results are presented, alongside those from the Moon and Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (MERBE). MERBE uses constant lunar reflectivity for tracking and compensation of instrument telescope degradation, undetectable by CERES. MERBE finds Earth albedo constant compared to that of the Moon, because Arctic solar warming effects are balanced by solar cooling elsewhere, likely due to negative feedbacks. Contrary to NASA, this shows the Sun is not increasing warming and that CERES results are not as stable as claimed and assumed. Furthermore, MERBE can actually resolve Cloud Radiative Forcing (CRF) sign...

Evaluating Twenty‐Year Trends in Earth's Energy Flows From Observations and Reanalyses

“…(2021) use a combination of altimetric and gravimetric observations from GRACE to find a similar trend in EEI. These results stand in marked contrast with Matthews (2021), who claim that there are “spurious calibration drifts” in the CERES record based upon an analysis of lunar reflectance measured by CERES. A direct comparison between the adjusted CERES Terra reflected SW values proposed by Matthews (2021) and the official CERES SSF1deg Ed4.1 product reveals that Matthews (2021) made the largest “corrections” to the CERES record (reaching −0.8 Wm −2 ) prior to when CERES Terra even started making lunar observations in October 2002 (Figure S6a in Supporting Information ).…”

“…These results stand in marked contrast with Matthews (2021), who claim that there are “spurious calibration drifts” in the CERES record based upon an analysis of lunar reflectance measured by CERES. A direct comparison between the adjusted CERES Terra reflected SW values proposed by Matthews (2021) and the official CERES SSF1deg Ed4.1 product reveals that Matthews (2021) made the largest “corrections” to the CERES record (reaching −0.8 Wm −2 ) prior to when CERES Terra even started making lunar observations in October 2002 (Figure S6a in Supporting Information ). If we restrict the comparison only to dates when CERES scans of the moon exist (Figure S6b in Supporting Information ), there is virtually no trend difference between the two records (trend difference of −0.012 Wm −2 per decade).…”

Assessment of Terra/Aqua MODIS and Deep Convective Cloud Albedo Solar Calibration Accuracies and Stabilities Using Lunar Calibrated MERBE Results

“…Now with thousands of lunar results per ERB device, the MERBE lunar results demonstrated [23] better than ±0.1%/decade calibration stability for Terra SW (two sigma, see Figure 1b after normalization to zero-libration or 'static' +7 • using the ROLO model [23,31]). In the MERBE Edition 1 data release, this then allowed correction [10] for the known CERES instrument drifts [9,11], still present and largely unknown by the science community, in the latest NASA CERES Ed4.1 released ERB climate results. This work therefore provides the first ever comparison of many hundreds of thousands of MODIS Earth footprints with those from a proven traceable solar calibration source from 2000-2015 [10,23,29].…”

“…Unfortunately, these responses have been found to degrade on-mission in ways un-trackable with onboard calibration targets, particularly for the ultraviolet region [7,8]. A resulting CERES approximate −0.5%/decade false trend of reflected solar radiation has been noted by multiple studies relative to the Moon [9,10] and will lead to incorrect climate model tuning that will suggest the Sun is largely responsible for global warming [11]. It is noted that there is also currently a statistically significant very slight decrease in the arriving solar flux to the Earth over time [12], but since this is a cross-instrument/albedo comparison that is independent of incoming solar, it plays no relative factor.…”

Solar Intensity Dispersing (SID) Concept for CubeSat Spectral CLARREO‐Like Radiance Measurements

“…It was set up in 2013 and has completely recalibrated all CERES Ed4.1 broadband ERB results from 2000 onwards. MERBE achieved an order of magnitude increase in accuracy over CERES (Matthews, 2018b), using the Moon's constant albedo as a stability target (Matthews, 2018a(Matthews, , 2018c(Matthews, , 2021. There however remains the problem that the true averaged albedo of the Moon, is not known to better than around 3% absolute accuracy (Kieffer & Stone, 2005).…”