A study of the time evolution of GERB shortwave calibration by comparison with CERES Edition-3A data

Article history: Received 14 January 2016 Received in revised form 8 August 2016 Accepted 7 September 2016 Available online xxxx This study examines the evolution of the GERB-2 and GERB-1 Edition 1 shortwave radiance calibration between 2004–2007 and 2007–2012 respectively, through comparisonwith CERES instrument FM1Edition 3A SSF instantaneous radiances. Two periods when simultaneous observations from both GERB-2 and GERB-1 were available, January 13th to February 11th 2007 andMay 1st to May 10th 2007, are also compared. For these two overlap periods respectively, averaged over all CERES ‘unfiltered-to-filtered radiance ratio’ subsets, the GERB-1/CERES unfiltered radiance ratio is on average found to be 1.6% and 1.9% lower than the associatedGERB-2/CERES unfiltered radiance ratio. Over the two longer time series the GERB/CERES unfiltered radiance ratio shows a general decreasewith time for bothGERB-2 andGERB-1. The rate of decrease varies through time but no significant seasonal dependence is seen. Averaged over all subsets the GERB-2/CERES unfiltered radiance ratio showed a decrease of 1.9% between June 2004 and June 2006. Between June 2007 and June 2012, the corresponding decrease in the GERB-1/CERES unfiltered radiance ratio was 6.5%. The evolution of the GERB/CERES unfiltered radiance ratio for both GERB-2 and GERB-1 shows a strong dependence on the CERES unfiltered-to-filtered radiance ratio, indicating that it is spectrally dependent. Further time-series analysis and theoretical work using simulated spectral radiance curves suggests that for GERB-1 the evolution is consistent with a darkening in the GERB shortwave spectral response functionwhich ismost pronounced at the shortest wavelengths. For GERB-2, no single spectral cause can be identified, suggesting that the evolution is likely due to a combination of several different effects. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).