The Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) is an integrated program of research, observations, and science activities with the goal of providing data sets to support accurate predictions of global and regional climate change. Research in the areas of Earth radiation budget, hydrometeorology, and modeling/prediction contribute to meeting the goal of GEWEX.

The NASA/GEWEX SRB project is a major component of the GEWEX radiation research. The objective of the NASA/GEWEX SRB project is to determine surface, top-of-atmosphere (TOA), and atmospheric shortwave (SW) and longwave (LW) radiative fluxes with the precision needed to predict transient climate variations and decadal-to-centennial climate trends.

The NASA/GEWEX SRB project team announces a modified version of the GEWEX Longwave data set. Denoted as version 3.1, this version corrects for a numerical instability issue that was found to affect a small number of 3 hourly grid box TOA outgoing and surface downward fluxes. The approximate number of grid boxes affected ranged from 7-12 (out of 8 hours x 30 days x 44016 total grid boxes) per month. The 3-hourly values in those instances were significantly in error but had little effect on daily, 3-hourly monthly and monthly averaged values. Users analyzing 3 hourly fields are advised to obtain the new data set. Please contact us if you have more specific questions.