Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN)

In Memoriam: Ellsworth Dutton

Dr. Ellsworth Dutton, chair of the Baseline Surface Radiation Network and its founder, passed away on October 11, 2012. The BSRN community expresses its sympathies and shares many memories of Ells on this page. If you would like to have your condolences included, please send them to gewex@gewex.org.

12^th Meeting of BSRN, 1-3 August 2012

The 12th meeting of BSRN was held on 1-3 August 2012 in Potsdam, Germany. The meeting was hosted by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) Research Unit at the Albert Einstein Science Park in Potsdam, Germany . The meeting was held the week before the International Radiation Commission's quadrennial Symposium (IRS-2012) in Berlin. Considering some overlap in interests and presentations between the two meetings, the BSRN meeting was shortened by one day to compensate for this overlap.

• Meeting Report
• Meeting Agenda (with links to presentations)
• Group Photo
  

About BSRN

The Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) was conceived and implemented in the late 1980s by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) with the collected data intended to be used for climate research applications, in particular; satellite product validation, climate model comparisons, and establishment of regional radiation climatologies, all in support of Earth radiation budget studies. In the mid-1990s, BSRN was included under GEWEX. In the late 1990s, BSRN was designated as a contributing network to the the WMO Global Atmospheric Watch (GAW) Program, and in 2004 was designated as the Global Baseline Surface Radiation Network of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS).

Because of the important role radiation plays in the climate system, the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) was established to provide a worldwide network to continuously measure radiative fluxes at the Earth's surface. Many of these stations began operation in 1992 and each year more stations are added to the network. About 40 stations in contrasting climatic zones, covering a latitude range from 80°N to 90°S (see station maps) are providing data to the BSRN archive located at the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. These stations provide data for the calibration of the GEWEX Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) Project and other satellite-based measurements of radiative fluxes.

To fulfill its institutional obligations to respond to the broader climate/scientific community, BSRN reports and answers annually to the GEWEX Radiation Panel, currently chaired by Prof. Christian Kummerow, and the GCOS/Atmospheric Observations Panel for Climate (AOPC) chaired by Dr. Adrian Simmons. The overall international management of the BSRN is provided by Dr. Ellsworth Dutton as part of his responsibilities within NOAA. The AWI BSRN Archive (also called the World Radiation Monitoring Center) is under the direction of Dr. Gert Koenig-Langlo. All data are interactively available for any scientist who accepted the data release guidelines see: http://www.bsrn.awi.de/en/data/data_retrieval_via_pangaea/ .

• Monitor the background shortwave and longwave radiative components (least influenced by immediate human activities which are regionally concentrated) and their changes with the best methods currently available.
• Provide data for the calibration of satellite-based estimates of the surface radiative fluxes.
• Produce high quality observational data to be used for validating the theoretical computations of radiative fluxes by models.

• BSRN-10 Report
• BSRN-11 Report

• Listing of Participants
• Meeting Agenda (with links to presentations)
• Group Photo
  
• Workshop summary report in May 2010 issue of GEWEX News
• BSRN-11 Report

Interim BSRN Project Manager
Dr. Joseph Michalsky
NOAA/Earth System Research Lab
Boulder, Colorado, USA

BSRN Science Chair
Dr. Christian Kummerow
Colorado State University
Ft. Collins, Colorado