Global and Regional Evaluation of the CERES Edition-4A Surface Solar Radiation and Its Uncertainty Quantification

This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of the 2000–2018 Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System Synoptic 1° Ed4A (CERES SYN1deg Edition 4A) surface solar radiation (SSR) product. In particular, the global assessment is conducted over different temporal scales (i.e., hourly, daily, and monthly-average) with special attention given to the impact of clouds, and a regional evaluation is further implemented over the Mainland of China (MC) using SSR measurements from a denser observational network provided by the China Meteorological Administration. Evaluation across all valid station-grid pairs yields mixed performance with |MBE|≤2.8 (6.2) W m
⁻²
, RMSE≤89.5 (31.6) W m
⁻²
, and
R
≥0.95 (0.93) over the globe (MC) for different temporal scales, and the monthly CERES SSR, with RMSE≤20 W m
⁻²
, is found to hold promise for global numerical weather prediction and climate monitoring. In addition, CERES is found to generally underestimate and overestimate SSR over land and ocean, respectively. Comparison between year-round and cloudy-season suggests that the presence of clouds may potentially impact the SSR retrievals, especially at the hourly temporal scales, with an increase in RMSE values larger than 10 W m
⁻²
for most stations. Further investigation of subgrid heterogeneity suggests that most
in situ
SSR measurements can reasonably represent the 1° grid average except for some stations with specific geographic deployments, which may raise significant spatial representativeness issues and, therefore, need to be used with great caution.