A new perspective of the physical processes associated with the clear-sky greenhouse effect over high latitudes

Abstract

The physical processes associated with the clear-sky greenhouse effect in the presence of water vapor are examined by including surface emissivity in the greenhouse effect formulation, and by introducing a new way to partition physical processes of the greenhouse effect. In this new framework, it is found that the clear-sky greenhouse effect is governed by three physical processes associated with (1) the temperature contrast between the surface and the atmosphere, (2) the interaction between the surface emissivity and the temperature contrast, and (3) the surface emissivity. The importance of the three physical processes is assessed by computing their vertical and spectral variations for the subarctic winter and summer standard atmosphere using the radiation model MODTRAN3 (Moderate Resolution Transmittance code Version 3). The results show that the process associated with the temperature contrast between the surface and the atmosphere dominates over the other two processes in magnitude. The magnitude of this process has substantial variations in the spectral region of 1250 to 1880 cm−1 and in the far infrared region. Due to the low-level temperature inversion over the subarctic winter, there exists a negative contribution to the greenhouse trapping. The seasonal variations are, however, dominated by the processes associated with the interaction between the surface emissivity and the temperature contrast as well as the surface emissivity itself. The magnitudes of these two physical processes contributing to the greenhouse trapping over the subarctic winter are about 7 to 10 times of those over the subarctic summer, whereas the magnitude of the processes associated with the temperature contrast in the subarctic summer is only about 2 times of that in the subarctic winter.