An exact calculation of infrared cooling rate due to water vapor

Abstract

The longwave (0–2380 cm−1) cooling rate due to water vapor in the troposphere and the stratosphere has been calculated by a new infrared transmission model in this paper. An exact scheme is used for treating the integration over wavenumber and the inhomogeneous path in the atmosphere. It is shown that the atmospheric window region (730–1200 cm−1) (mainly water vapor continuum) plays an important role in the total cooling near the surface, about 72% of the total cooling lying in this region at the height of 1 km; the CG approximation used for an inhomogeneous path is fairly applicable for calculating the cooling rate due to water vapor, with a maximum error of 0.16 K/day throughout the troposhere and the stratosphere; on the other hand, the error due to the diffusivity factor of 1.66 appears to be slightly larger near the surface. In this study, the influences on the calculation of above infrared cooling rate, of the temperature-dependence of the absorption coefficients of water vapor, the upper level cutoff and the integration step for altitude, and the substitution of the quasi-grey approximation for the exact integration over wavenumber, are also examined.