scholarly journals Aerosol - cloud - climate effect : Study with a radiative transfer model

MAUSAM ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-202
Author(s):  
M. RAJEEVAN
Keyword(s):  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Radiative Forcing ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Radiative Transfer Model ◽  
Transfer Model ◽  
Concentration Data ◽  
Climate Effect ◽  
Model Calculations ◽  
Indirect Forcing

The indirect radiative forcing (through the enhancement of cloud albedo) due to anthropogenic sulphate aerosols was calculated using a three-dimensional radiative transfer model. The calculations were made with diurnal and seasonal cycles and three-dimensional distributions of sulphate aerosol concentration data. The globally averaged annual mean indirect forcing is estimated to be -1.13 Wm-2 which is comparable with the recent General Circulation Model calculations. This forcing of -1.13 Wm-2 is compared with 2.12 Wm-2 due to increase in greenhouse gases from the pre-industrial period to the present. This indirect forcing due to anthropogenic aerosol is substantially higher than the warming effect due to gases over the industrial regions in the northern hemisphere, so that the net radiative forcing over these regions is negative. i.e., cooling. Some uncertainties in the estimation of the indirect forcing that needs further research are pointed out.

Radiative forcing over the Arctic of aerosols from the August 2017 Canadian and Greenlandic wildfires

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Calì Quaglia ◽  
Daniela Meloni ◽  
Alcide Giorgio di Sarra ◽  
Tatiana Di Iorio ◽  
Virginia Ciardini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Radiative Forcing ◽  
Solar Zenith Angle ◽  
Surface Albedo ◽  
High Arctic ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Radiative Transfer Model ◽  
Transfer Model ◽  
Aerosol Layer ◽  
Radiative Effect

<p>Extended and intense wildfires occurred in Northern Canada and, unexpectedly, on the Greenlandic West coast during summer 2017. The thick smoke plume emitted into the atmosphere was transported to the high Arctic, producing one of the largest impacts ever observed in the region. Evidence of Canadian and Greenlandic wildfires was recorded at the Thule High Arctic Atmospheric Observatory (THAAO, 76.5°N, 68.8°W, www.thuleatmos-it.it) by a suite of instruments managed by ENEA, INGV, Univ. of Florence, and NCAR. Ground-based observations of the radiation budget have allowed quantification of the surface radiative forcing at THAAO. </p><p>Excess biomass burning chemical tracers such as CO, HCN, H2CO, C2H6, and NH3 were  measured in the air column above Thule starting from August 19 until August 23. The aerosol optical depth (AOD) reached a peak value of about 0.9 on August 21, while an enhancement of wildfire compounds was  detected in PM10. The measured shortwave radiative forcing was -36.7 W/m2 at 78° solar zenith angle (SZA) for AOD=0.626.</p><p>MODTRAN6.0 radiative transfer model (Berk et al., 2014) was used to estimate the aerosol radiative effect and the heating rate profiles at 78° SZA. Measured temperature profiles, integrated water vapour, surface albedo, spectral AOD and aerosol extinction profiles from CALIOP onboard CALIPSO were used as model input. The peak  aerosol heating rate (+0.5 K/day) was  reached within the aerosol layer between 8 and 12 km, while the maximum radiative effect (-45.4 W/m2) is found at 3 km, below the largest aerosol layer.</p><p>The regional impact of the event that occurred on August 21 was investigated using a combination of atmospheric radiative transfer modelling with measurements of AOD and ground surface albedo from MODIS. The aerosol properties used in the radiative transfer model were constrained by in situ measurements from THAAO. Albedo data over the ocean have been obtained from Jin et al. (2004). Backward trajectories produced through HYSPLIT simulations (Stein et al., 2015) were also employed to trace biomass burning plumes.</p><p>The radiative forcing efficiency (RFE) over land and ocean was derived, finding values spanning from -3 W/m2 to -132 W/m2, depending on surface albedo and solar zenith angle. The fire plume covered a vast portion of the Arctic, with large values of the daily shortwave RF (< -50 W/m2) lasting for a few days. This large amount of aerosol is expected to influence cloud properties in the Arctic, producing significant indirect radiative effects.</p>

Evaluation of shortwave radiation fluxes in the multi-layer SPARTACUS-Urban scheme using DART

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Stretton ◽  
William Morrison ◽  
Robin Hogan ◽  
Sue Grimmond
Keyword(s):  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Weather Prediction ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Shortwave Radiation ◽  
Radiative Transfer Model ◽  
Transfer Model ◽  
Urban Structure

<p>The heterogenous structure of cities impacts radiative exchanges (e.g. albedo and heat storage). Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models often characterise the urban structure with an infinite street canyon – but this does not capture the three-dimensional urban form. SPARTACUS-Urban (SU) - a fast, multi-layer radiative transfer model designed for NWP - is evaluated using the explicit Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART) model for shortwave fluxes across several model domains – from a regular array of cubes to real cities .</p><p>SU agrees with DART (errors < 5.5% for all variables) when the SU assumptions of building distribution are fulfilled (e.g. randomly distribution). For real-world areas with pitched roofs, SU underestimates the albedo (< 10%) and shortwave transmission to the surface (< 15%), and overestimates wall-plus-roof absorption (9-27%), with errors increasing with solar zenith angle. SU should be beneficial to weather and climate models, as it allows more realistic urban form (cf. most schemes) without large increases in computational cost.</p>

scholarly journals Improvement of the Simulation of Cloud Longwave Scattering in Broadband Radiative Transfer Models

2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (7) ◽  
pp. 2217-2233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guanglin Tang ◽  
Ping Yang ◽  
George W. Kattawar ◽  
Xianglei Huang ◽  
Eli J. Mlawer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Multiple Scattering ◽  
General Circulation ◽  
General Circulation Models ◽  
Radiative Transfer Model ◽  
Transfer Model ◽  
Discrete Ordinate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Scaling Methods ◽  
Computational Errors

Abstract Cloud longwave scattering is generally neglected in general circulation models (GCMs), but it plays a significant and highly uncertain role in the atmospheric energy budget as demonstrated in recent studies. To reduce the errors caused by neglecting cloud longwave scattering, two new radiance adjustment methods are developed that retain the computational efficiency of broadband radiative transfer simulations. In particular, two existing scaling methods and the two new adjustment methods are implemented in the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model (RRTM). The results are then compared with those based on the Discrete Ordinate Radiative Transfer model (DISORT) that explicitly accounts for multiple scattering by clouds. The two scaling methods are shown to improve the accuracy of radiative transfer simulations for optically thin clouds but not effectively for optically thick clouds. However, the adjustment methods reduce computational errors over a wide range, from optically thin to thick clouds. With the adjustment methods, the errors resulting from neglecting cloud longwave scattering are reduced to less than 2 W m−2 for the upward irradiance at the top of the atmosphere and less than 0.5 W m−2 for the surface downward irradiance. The adjustment schemes prove to be more accurate and efficient than a four-stream approximation that explicitly accounts for multiple scattering. The neglect of cloud longwave scattering results in an underestimate of the surface downward irradiance (cooling effect), but the errors are almost eliminated by the adjustment methods (warming effect).

scholarly journals FLiES-SIF ver. 1.0: Three-dimensional radiative transfer model for estimating solar induced fluorescence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuma Sakai ◽  
Hideki Kobayashi ◽  
Tomomichi Kato
Keyword(s):  
Sensitivity Analysis ◽  
Chlorophyll Fluorescence ◽  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Radiative Transfer Model ◽  
Model Description ◽  
Transfer Model ◽  
Plant Canopy ◽  
Parallel Layer ◽  
Leaf Level

Abstract. Global terrestrial ecosystems control the atmospheric CO2 concentration through gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration processes. Chlorophyll fluorescence is one of the energy release pathways of excess incident lights in the photosynthetic process. Over the last ten years, extensive studies have been revealed that canopy scale sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), which potentially provides a direct pathway to link leaf level photosynthesis to global GPP, can be observed from satellites. SIF is used to infer photosynthetic capacity of plant canopy, however, it is not clear how the leaf-level SIF emission contributes to the top of canopy directional SIF. Plant canopy radiative transfer models are the useful tools to understand the causality of directional canopy SIF. One dimensional (1-D) plane parallel layer models (e.g. the Soil Canopy Observation, Photochemistry and Energy fluxes (SCOPE) model) have been widely used and are useful to understand the general mechanisms behind the temporal and seasonal variations in SIF. However, due to the lack of complexity of the actual canopy structures, three dimensional models (3-D) have a potential to delineate the realistic directional canopy SIFs. Forest Light Environmental Simulator for SIF (FLiES-SIF) version 1.0 is the 3-D Monte Carlo plant canopy radiative transfer model to understand the biological and physical mechanisms behind the SIF emission from complex forest canopies. In this model description paper, we focused on the model formulation and simulation schemes, and showed some sensitivity analysis against several major variables such as view angle and leaf area index (LAI). The simulation results show that SIF increases with LAI then saturated at LAI > 2–4 depending on the spectral wavelength. The sensitivity analysis also shows that simulated SIF radiation may decrease with LAI at higher LAI domain (LAI > 5). These phenomena are seen in certain sun and view angle conditions. This type of non-linear and non-monotonic SIF behavior to LAI is also related to spatial forest structure patterns. FLiES-SIF version 1.0 can be used to quantify the canopy SIF in various view angles including the contribution of multiple scattering which is the important component in the near infrared domain. The potential use of the model is to standardize the satellite SIF by correcting the bi-directional effect. This step will contribute to the improvement of the GPP estimation accuracy through SIF.

scholarly journals Seeking edge-on galaxies with substantial extraplanar dust using a radiative transfer model: determination of the model parameter uncertainties for EON_10.477_41.954 (FGC 79)

2019 ◽  
Vol 489 (4) ◽  
pp. 4690-4704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jong-Ho Shinn
Keyword(s):  
Radiative Transfer ◽  
Confidence Intervals ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Radiative Transfer Model ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Transfer Model ◽  
Target Classification ◽  
Parameter Uncertainties ◽  
Model Parameter ◽  
Galaxy Model

ABSTRACT We have revisited the target EON_10.477_41.954 in order to determine more accurately the uncertainties in the model parameters that are important for target classification (i.e. galaxies with or without substantial extraplanar dust). We performed a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis for the 15 parameters of the three-dimensional radiative-transfer galaxy model we used previously for target classification. To investigate the convergence of the MCMC sampling – which is usually neglected in the literature but should not be – we monitored the integrated autocorrelation time (τint), and we achieved effective sample sizes >5650 for all the model parameters. The confidence intervals are unstable at the beginning of the iterations where the values of τint are increasing, but they become stable in later iterations where those values are almost constant. The final confidence intervals are ∼5–100 times larger than the nominal uncertainties used in our previous study (the standard deviation of three best-fitting results). Thus, those nominal uncertainties are not good proxies for the model-parameter uncertainties. Although the position of EON_10.477_41.954 in the target-classification plot (the scale height to diameter ratio of dust versus that of light source) decreases by about 20–30 per cent when compared to our previous study, its membership in the ‘high-group’ – i.e. among galaxies with substantial extraplanar dust – nevertheless remains unchanged.

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