The paper is focused on the determination of radiation budget components at surface as well as at top of atmosphere using remotely sensed data for a few convective cloud cases between 1990 and 1993. The target area for this investigation is Central Europe and covers an area of approx. 1800 x 1800 km 2 . Preliminary results from heating rate computations will further be given.To infer the individual radiation budget components at surface from NOAA-AVHRR and Meteosat data, an inverse remote sensing technique was applied. This techniques uses partly look-up tables, which are generated for different atmospheric conditions. For the atmospheric radiative transfer a delta two-stream approximation scheme was used. The tables consider different variables, like solar zenith angle, cloud optical depth, cloud base height, and for the longwave standard temperature and humidity profiles.The cloud optical properties were computed with the same delta two-stream approximation scheme, where a cloud classification was carried out in advance to distinguish between cloud types. This information was used to define the microphysical cloud properties. For the atmospheric conditions monthly means of horizontal visibility and relative humidity were taken into account.The radiation budget components at top of atmosphere were computed using a narrow-to-broadband conversion considering all geometrical conditions. Finally, the heating rates for four atmospheric layers were also calculated based on the inverse remote sensing technique.