HR: 17:35h
AN: A54D-09    [Abstracts]
TI: Review of NIST Capabilities for Improving Calibration and Validation of Climate Sensing Systems
AU: * Rice, J P
EM: joe.rice@nist.gov
AF: NIST, 100 Bureau Dr., Gaithersburg, MD 20899, United States
AB: During the past two decades, a few key developments have emerged at NIST and other national measurement institutes that are destined to have a positive fundamental impact on the ability to improve the future SI traceable climate record. These began with the establishment of absolute cryogenic electrical substitution radiometry to provide highly accurate scales, followed by the development of practical methods to propagate the scales to the types of spectral radiance and irradiance measurements that pervade the remote sensing of climate change. This presentation will review these developments and consider their impact on calibration and validation of future climate sensor systems. We discuss how the radiant power scale is established at NIST through cryogenic radiometers such as the Primary Optical Watt Radiometer (POWR), and how NIST propagates this scale to the other radiometric scales at the Spectral Irradiance and Radiance Calibrations with Uniform Sources (SIRCUS) facility. Some examples will be discussed where calibration issues on specific remote sensing instruments were resolved by comparison with these scales. Also, the importance of independently arriving at radiometric scales through completely different physical means will be highlighted, for the case of spectral radiance, by discussing the comparison of electrical substitution-based scales to blackbody-based scales. This is particularly important to the problem of verifying absolute uncertainty claims of 0.1 K, 3 sigma, in the spectrally- resolved thermal-infrared radiance. Finally, we discuss the recent development at NIST of a Hyperspectral Image Projector (HIP), which propagates electrical-substitution-based scales to complex, realistic spectra and even to realistic hyperspectral spatial scenes, and its proposed application to climate sensor calibration and validation.
DE: 0394 Instruments and techniques
DE: 1640 Remote sensing (1855)
DE: 1694 Instruments and techniques
DE: 7538 Solar irradiance
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting