The Combined ASTER and MODIS Emissivity over Land (CAMEL) Global Broadband Infrared Emissivity Product

Infrared surface emissivity is needed for the calculation of net longwave radiation, a critical parameter in weather and climate models and Earth’s radiation budget. Due to a prior lack of spatially and temporally variant global broadband emissivity (BBE) measurements of the surface, it is common practice in land surface and climate models to set BBE to a single constant over the globe. This can lead to systematic biases in the estimated net and longwave radiation for any particular location and time of year. Under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) project, a new global, high spectral resolution land surface emissivity dataset has recently been made available at monthly at 0.05 degree resolution since 2000. Called the Combined ASTER MODIS Emissivity over Land (CAMEL), this dataset is created by the merging of the MODIS baseline-fit emissivity database developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the ASTER Global Emissivity Dataset (GED) produced at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. CAMEL has 13 hinge points between 3.6–14.3 µm which are expanded to cover 417 infrared spectral channels within the same wavelength region using a principal component regression approach. This work presents the method for calculating BBE using the new CAMEL dataset. BBE is computed via numerical integration over the CAMEL High Spectral Resolution product for two different wavelength ranges—3.6–14.3 µm which takes advantage of the full, available CAMEL spectra and 8.0–13.5 µm which has been determined to be an optimal range for computing the most representative all wavelength, longwave net radiation. CAMEL BBE uncertainty estimates are computed, and comparisons are made to BBE computed from lab validation data for selected case sites. Variations of BBE over time and land cover classification schemes are investigated and converted into flux to demonstrate the equivalent error in longwave radiation which would be made by the use of a single, constant BBE value. Misrepresentations in BBE by 0.05 at 310 K corresponds to potential errors in longwave radiation of over 25 W/m2.