Climate and the Earth's Radiation Budget

Among the first payloads aboard satellites in the early 1960s were instruments for measuring the Earth's radiation budget. The radiation budget consists of the incident and reflected sunlight and the long-wave (infrared and far infrared) radiation emitted to space. The source for the recent spurt in scientific and public interest in the greenhouse effect and global warming is the alteration of the radiation budget by the anthropogenic emission of trace gases into the atmosphere.