American Geophysical Union Become an AGU Member
Subscribe to AGU Journals		 AGU Home AGU Publications

Print Version (119011 bytes)

EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, VOL. 87, NO. 5, doi:10.1029/2006EO050006, 2006

New Directions in the Radiative Transfer of Cloudy Atmospheres

Lazaros Oreopoulos

University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA


Alexander Marshak

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA


Robert F. Cahalan

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA


Tamás Várnai

University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA


Anthony B. Davis

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA


Andreas Macke

Leibniz-Institute for Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany,


Abstract

Atmospheric radiative transfer plays a central role in understanding global climate change and anthropogenic climate forcing, and in the remote sensing of surface and atmospheric properties. Because of their opacity and highly scattering nature, clouds (covering more than half the planet at any time) pose unique challenges in atmospheric radiative transfer calculations. Some widely-used assumptions regarding clouds—such as having a flat top and base, horizontal uniformity, and infinite extent—are amenable to simple one-dimensional (1-D( radiative transfer and are therefore attractive from a computational point of view. However, these assumptions are completely unrealistic and yield errors. The ever-increasing need to realistically simulate cloud radiative processes in remote sensing and energy budget applications has contributed to the recent rapid growth of the three-dimensional (3-D) radiative transfer (RT) community [e.g., Marshak and Davis, 2005].

Published 31 January 2006.

Index Terms: 0321 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Cloud/radiation interaction; 0360 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Radiation: transmission and scattering; 0319 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Cloud optics.

Print Version (119011 bytes)

Citation: Oreopoulos, L., A. Marshak, R. F. Cahalan, T. Várnai, A. B. Davis, and A. Macke (2006), New Directions in the Radiative Transfer of Cloudy Atmospheres, Eos Trans. AGU, 87(5), doi:10.1029/2006EO050006.