Albedo ------ The albedo field appears in the portion of the reanalysis archive that was created before late April 1995. This field is mislabeled and is the albedo before the zenith angle corrections are made. This field does not appear on the CD-ROM. The albedo should be computed from the upward and downward short-wave fluxes. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The surface albedo over the oceans is too high. The parameterization does not agree with the paper on which it is based (Payne 1972, J. Atmos. Sci.). --------------------------------------------------------------------- The surface albedo over the Sahara desert (and other bright deserts) leave something to be desired. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Reanalysis originally was using the SiB albedo until we found some problem with it. We reverted to the Matthews' climatology which we used before the change to SiB. People at NCEP are now investigating using satellite data (ex. ERBE) to get a data set from which we can calculate the albedo (which is a function of zenith angle and cloudiness).