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Seasonal Changes in Earth's Surface Albedo

About 50 million square kilometers of the Earth's terrestrial surface undergo a transition each year from freeze to thaw, thus setting off a series of global biospheric processes. Much of this activity can be detected by the temporal changes in the amount of sunlight reflected by the Earth's surface at various wavelengths. A quantitative measure of this reflected sunlight is described by the albedo, which is the fraction of sunlight reflected by a surface area to that incident on the surface area in all directions, typically in a given spectral band. The surface albedo can vary between zero (all incident sunlight is absorbed at the surface and none is reflected) and one (all incident sunlight is reflected from the surface and none is absorbed).

 

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Credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team

Image Number: PIA04378

Date: December 20, 2010

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Uploaded on December 20, 2017
Taken on December 20, 2010