[1] The mean cloud albedo over a spatial or temporal domain depends not only on the mean cloud condensation nucleus (CCN) spectrum but also on the CCN spectrum variation. When the variation of CCN spectrum is neglected, cloud albedo calculated using the mean CCN spectrum is positively biased. The CCN spectrum variation due to either variation in size distribution or chemical composition, as wel...

The land surface albedo is among the most important parameters controlling the atmospheric radiation fluxes and the surface–atmosphere interactions. In the present study, surface albedo parameters and aerosol optical thickness (AOT) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, onboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, were analyzed and processed for the estimation...

Most high-altitude lakes are more sensitive to global warming than the regional atmosphere. However, most existing climate models produce unrealistic surface temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) lakes, and few studies have focused on the influence of ice surface albedo on high-altitude lakes. Based on field albedo measurements, moderate resolution imaging spectrometer (MODIS) albedo product...

Surface albedo is an important concept, useful in explaining how closed systems (such as the Earth Atmosphere) respond to incident radiant energy. Specialist, calibrated equipment is used by geo-scientists to measure ambient and reflected radiation from subject sources – this is often cost prohibitive within a teaching environment. A “semi” calibrated method is presented, utilising simple digit...

Vegetation albedo is a critical component of the Earth’s climate system, yet efforts to evaluate and improve albedo parameterizations in climate models have lagged relative to other aspects of model development. Here, we calculated growing season albedos for deciduous and evergreen forests, crops, and grasslands based on over 40 site-years of data from the AmeriFlux network and compared them wi...

Many subtropical and mid-latitude regions are expected to become drier due to climate change. This will lead to reduced vegetation which may in turn amplify the initial drying due to positive feedbacks such as albedo change in response to biome redistribution, an effect rarely accounted for in climate projections. Using a coupled atmosphere-ocean-land model with a dynamic vegetation component t...

The MODIS daily snow albedo product is a data layer in the MOD10A1 snow-cover product that includes snow-covered area and fractional snow cover as well as quality information and other metadata (Riggs et al., 2006; Hall and Riggs, 2007). It was developed to augment the MODIS BRDF/Albedo algorithm (MCD43) that provides 16-day maps of albedo globally at 500-m resolution (Schaaf et al., 2002). But...