Evaluation of the J-OFURO3 Sea Surface Net Radiation and Inconsistency Correction

A new satellite-based product containing daily sea surface net radiation (Rn) values at a spatial resolution of 0.25° from 1988 to 2013, named the Japanese Ocean Flux Data Sets with Use of Remote Sensing Observations, version 3 (J-OFURO3), was recently generated and released. In this letter, the performance of the J-OFURO3 sea-surface Rn product was fully evaluated by using observations from 55 global moored buoy sites. The overall accuracy was satisfactory, with root-mean-square difference (RMSD) of 24.05 and 10.76 Wm−2 at daily and monthly scales, respectively. However, an inconsistency issue was found in the long-term variations in the J-OFURO3 sea-surface Rn values in approximately 2000; this inconsistency may be due to the replacement of the input dataset. To address this issue, a simple but effective inconsistency correction method was developed and conducted in this study. The analysis results demonstrated that the variations in the corrected J-OFURO3 sea-surface Rn data were more reasonable and that its daily validation accuracy was significantly improved by decreasing the bias from 4.67 to 0.27 Wm−2 before the year 2000. Thereby, it is suggested that the inconsistency correction method should be applied before using the J-OFURO3 sea-surface Rn data. However, the data users still should be cautious about another discontinuity issues caused by the quality of the input dataset itself.