Asynoptic sampling considerations for wide-field-of-view measurements of outgoing radiation. Part II: diurnal and random space-time variability

Two classes of tropical cloud variability: i) random small-scale fluctuations and ii) diurnal variations, are investigated with regard to deriving fields of emitted radiation from wide-field-of-view (WFOV) measurements of outgoing radiance made aboard polar orbiting satellites. irregular cloud variability is represented in terms of a stochastic space-time process. Diurnal cloud variability is prescribed in terms of a propagating solar waveform which likewise is confined to a horizontal envelope. For both classes of convective behavior, the evolving radiation field is sampled asynoptically, deconvolved, and compared with the true variability. For realistic convective scales, the retrieved behavior is aliased by unresolved variability. Contemporaneous WFOV measurements from several satellites orbiting the globe (eg ERBE) may hold the solution to this problem. The expanded information content, represented by the combined data, should capture most if not all of the large-scale variability unresolved by single satellite sampling. -from Author