Word: albedo
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...gone to Beijing's Tsinghua University, the "MIT of China," to make his half-apocalyptic, half-optimistic pitch about climate change. In his nerdy professor style and referring to "Milankovitch cycles" and the "albedo effect" as well as melting glaciers and rising seas, Chu methodically explained that the science is clear, that we're boiling the planet - but also that science can save us, that we can innovate our way to sustainability. He acknowledged that the developed nations that made the mess can't tell the developing world not to develop, but he also warned that China is on track...
...have to go Down Under to see a kangaroo--just orbit Earth once or twice. A 105-ft.-long (32 m) white cardboard image of the beloved marsupial was photographed by satellites on May 20 as part of a multicountry project to study the albedo effect, the amount of sunlight that reflects off Earth's surface. Scientists are gathering data to raise awareness of how the whiteness of the polar ice caps, currently shrinking because of global warming, helps deflect heat from the sun and keep the planet cool...
Tiros II has five detectors that measure different kinds of infra-red radiation coming up from the earth. They are working splendidly, and their reports will give new information about the earth's albedo (reflectivity) and about the temperature and humidity of the upper layers of the atmosphere. This sort of data is precious to meteorologists...
...Suomi, is fashioning metal spheres two inches in diameter that will be carried by a satellite to measure radiation from both the sun and the earth. The U.S. Army Signal Corps is preparing a special photoelectric cell to detect variations of light from the earth, thus measuring the "albedo" (reflectivity) of cloud formations that the satellite passes over...
...best way to estimate the earth's overall albedo is to measure the brightness of "earthlight" on sunless parts of the moon, allowing for the earth's size and distance, and how much of its disk is in sunlight. Figured this way, the earth's albedo is about .40, which means that it reflects four-tenths of the sunlight that falls on it. It is dimmer than cloud-covered Venus (.64) but much brighter than the naked, rocky moon (.073). The brightness varies a good deal with the season, probably because of changes in the amount...