How NASA Calculates Earth's Energy Budget [Infographic]

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Energy from the Sun is heating up our planet.

The learn more please visit our friends at NASA.

At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Norman Loeb, is keeping an eye on Earth's energy budget. He is the principal investigator of NASA’s radiation budget science project and he is using instruments on orbiting satellites to keep track of how much energy is coming to the Earth from the Sun and how much the Earth is expelling back out into space. This information is crucial to helping us understand whether the Earth is heating up or cooling down. To put it another way, it gives insights into global warming as well as some other applications.

The project uses space born devices known as CERES which stands for, Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System. The latest of the CERES instruments, which is scheduled to launch in the next few weeks, will be the sixth functioning CERES instrument in orbit. The original CERES was launched in 1997 and collected data until 2000. Since that time NASA launched CERES FM1 and FM2 in 1999, CERES FM3 and FM4 in 2002, and CERES FM5 in 2011. All of the CERES instruments are aboard satellites orbiting the Earth and they work together to provide data from the top of the atmosphere on how much energy from the Sun is being absorbed and how much is being reflected.

Knowing how much energy is going into the system is vital in calculating the budget. To put it in simple terms, if more energy is coming into the system than is leaving, then the system is heating up, and adversely if more energy is leaving than is coming in, then the system is cooling.

The infographic below shows how the Energy Budget for Earth is calculated.

Kander10 Designs

Energy from the Sun is heating up our planet.

The learn more please visit our friends at NASA.

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