Estimation of daily mean photosynthetically active radiation under all-sky conditions based on relative sunshine data

Abstract

Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) is absorbed by plants to carry out photosynthesis. Its estimation is important for many applications such as ecological modeling. In this study, a broadband transmittance scheme for solar radiation at the PAR band is developed to estimate clear-sky PAR values. The influence of clouds is subsequently taken into account through sunshine-duration data. This scheme is examined without local calibration against the observed PARvalues under both clear- and cloudy-sky conditions at sevenwidely distributed SurfaceRadiation BudgetNetwork (SURFRAD) stations. The results indicate that the scheme can estimate the daily mean PAR at these seven stations under all-sky conditions with root-mean-square error and mean bias error values ranging from 6.03 to 6.83 W m -2 and from -2.86 to 1.03 W m -2, respectively. Further analyses indicate that the scheme can estimate PAR values well with globally available aerosol and ozone datasets. This suggests that the scheme can be applied to regions for which observed aerosol and ozone data are not available. © 2012 American Meteorological Society.