Temporal sampling error analysis of the Earth’s outgoing radiation from a Moon-based platform

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the temporal sampling error on the Earth’s outgoing radiation, with a potential Earth observation platform, the Moon-based platform. To simulate the Earth’s outgoing radiation viewed from a Moon-based platform, we used the datasets of the NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Version 5 (GEOS-5) systems as the truth. The analysis is proposed by sampling the simulated time series. The sampling uncertainty associated with a given sampling interval is measured by computing the Root-Mean-Square-Error (RMSE) of the original and subsampled time series. The effects of different sampling intervals are evaluated by maximum bias. The effects of different sampling time are estimated by comparing correlations between the subsampled time series of different start time at specific temporal interval and the origin. The results show that the temporal sampling errors have the characteristics of the periodical uncertainties and bias, and 4-h sampling interval is a turning point. The sampling interval larger than 4 h will result in large uncertainties and bias.

Acknowledgments

The GEOS data used in this study have been provided by the Global Modelling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. The authors are very grateful to the editor and referees for comments and suggestions which led to the present improved version of the paper. The authors also would like to thank Prof. Jingsong Ping, Prof. Wei Zheng, Dr Mingyuan Wang, and Wenxiao Li for helpful discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant number 41590852, 41574014, 41774014 and 61771470], the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS, [Grant No. QYZDY-SSW-DQC026], and the Director Graduate Student Foundation of Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences [Y7SY1400CX].