Gridded, Averaged Earth Radiation Parameters from the NIMBUS-7 Earth Radiation Budget (ERB-MATRIX)

The Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) instrument aboard the Nimbus-7 is to provide
measurements of the radiation entering and exiting the earth-atmosphere system
for climate study. The MATRIX data contains daily, cyclic (6 day), and monthly
averaged ERB parameters on an approximately equal area ERB world grid (500 km x
500 km) as well as on mercator and polar stereographic map grids.

The radiation parameters on MATRIX include outgoing longwave radiation, albedo,
net radiation and their statistics calculated from the fixed Wide Field of View
(WFOV) sensors and the Narrow Field of View (NFOV) scanner. Both daytime
(ascending node) and nighttime (descending node) data are available. The
scanner failed on June 22, 1980 and the NFOV data is available only for the
period November 1978 - June 1980.

There is one MATRIX tape per month, beginning November 1978. The monthly MATRIX
tapes are further processed to yield a new data product called ERB MATRIX
Summary Tape (EMST). The EMST consists of monthly averaged world grid data
extracted from the monthly MATRIX tapes. The latest EMST contains the world
grid data for the period November 1978 - October 1986. Other related data sets
include: the NOAA heat budget data from AVHRR (HB/NOAA), CMATRIX from the
Nimbus-7 THIR (CL/TN7), and ERBE-S9 and -S10 from ERBS and NOAA-9 and -10.