Net radiation plays an essential role in determining the thermal conditions of the Earth’s surface and is an important parameter for the study of land-surface processes and global climate change. In this paper, an improved satellite-based approach to estimate the daily net radiation is presented, in which sunshine duration were derived from the geostationary meteorological satellite (FY-2D) cloud classification product, the monthly empirical as and bs Angstrom coefficients for net shortwave radiation were calibrated by spatial fitting of the ground data from 1997 to 2006, and the daily net longwave radiation was calibrated with ground data from 2007 to 2010 over the Heihe River Basin in China. The estimated daily net radiation values were validated against ground data for 12 months in 2008 at four stations with different underlying surface types. The average coefficient of determination (R2) was 0.8489, and the averaged Nash-Sutcliffe equation (NSE) was 0.8356. The close agreement between the estimated daily net radiation and observations indicates that the proposed method is promising, especially given the comparison between the spatial distribution and the interpolation of sunshine duration. Potential applications include climate research, energy balance studies and the estimation of global evapotranspiration.