Some comments on ‘variations of the Earth's albedo deduced from the ashen light of the Moon’, by Heinz Hilbrecht and Gerd Küveler

✍ Scribed by Garry E. Hunt

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1985
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 120 KB
• Volume: 33
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1573-0794
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00054713

✦ Synopsis

Hilbrecht and Kiiveler (1985)

have presented the results of 'possible' variations of the Earth's albedo which have been deduced from the ashen light of the Moon. The observations presented in the paper were made during the period of June 1972 to December 1973. While it is acknowledged that studies of the possible variations of the Earth's albedo are an important part of investigations of climate variations, the approach adopted by Hilbrecht and Kiiveler (lot tit) and the results presented are not sufficiently accurate for this purpose.

During the early part of this century a number of astronomers made estimates of the global mean albedo of the Earth using this approach (Hunt et al., 1985). In Table I we have summarised the values that were estimated during these previous studies. The wide variation in values of the Earth's albedo would, at first, suggest a major climatic change! However, the differences between the individual results is a direct result of the difficulties in accurately interpreting the photometric observations as a consequence of the phase ventions of the total and local regions of the Moon.

The variations of the brightness of the ashen light are shown in Figure 3 of Hilbrecht and Kiiveler (lop tit). There are differences of a factor of 6 in the observations during January, March 1973 and July 1973 (see Figure 1 of Hilbrecht and Kiiveler) which will drastically affect the statistical significance of the results. Furthermore, the error bars of TABLE I Some astronomical estimates of the planetary albedo Albedo Russell 1916 0.41-0.49 Danjon 1928 0.29 Danjon 1936 0.39 Satellite Estimate -0.3 Earth, Moon, andPlanets 33 (1985) 109-110. 0167-9295/85.15.