The albedo

The albedo is determined as a combination of background monthly climate fields and forecast surface fields (e.g. snow depth). Over sea-ice the albedo is set to 0.5 and 0.7 for two spectral bands. Open water has a diffuse albedo of 0.06, and a direct albedo function of the cosine of the solar zenith angle. Over land the albedo varies between 0.07 to 0.20 for snow in forest, but can go up to 0.80 for exposed snow.