Surface Solar Radiation in North America: A Comparison of Observations, Reanalyses, Satellite, and Derived Products*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Observations of daily surface solar or shortwave radiation data from over 4000 stations have been gathered, covering much of the continental United States as well as portions of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. The quantity of data increases almost linearly from 1998, when only several hundred stations had data. A quality-control procedure utilizing threshold values along with computing the clear-sky radiation envelope for individual stations was implemented to both screen bad data and rescue informative data. Over two-thirds of the observations are seen as acceptable. There are 15 different surface solar radiation products assessed relative to observations, including reanalyses [Twentieth-Century Reanalysis (20CR), CFS Reanalysis and Reforecast (CFSRR), ERA-Interim, Japanese 55-year Reanalysis Project (JRA-55), MERRA, NARR, and NCEP–NCAR Reanalysis 1 (NCEP-1)], derived products [observations from the CRU and NCEP-1 (CRU–NCEP); Daily Surface Weather and Climatological Summaries (Daymet); Global Land Data Assimilation System, version 1 (GLDAS-1); Global Soil Wetness Project Phase 3 (GSWP3); Multiscale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model Intercomparison Project (MsTMIP); and phase 2 of the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2)], and two satellite products (CERES and GOES). All except the CERES product have daily or finer temporal resolution. The RMSE of spatial biases is greater than 18 W m−2 for 13 of the 15 products over the summer season (June–August). None of the daily resolution products fulfill all three desirable criteria of low (<5%) annual or seasonal bias, high correlation with observed cloudiness, and correct distribution of clear-sky radiation. Some products display vestiges of underlying algorithm issues [e.g., from the Mountain Microclimate Simulation Model, version 4.3 (MTCLIM 4.3)] or bias-correction methods. A new bias-correction method is introduced that preserves clear-sky radiation values and better replicates cloudiness statistics. The current quantity of data over the continental United States suggests that a solar radiation product based on, or enhanced with, observations is feasible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".