An Improved Parameterization for Estimating Effective Atmospheric Emissivity for Use in Calculating Daytime Downwelling Longwave Radiation

Abstract

Abstract An improved parameterization is presented for estimating effective atmospheric emissivity for use in calculating downwelling longwave radiation based on temperature, humidity, pressure, and solar radiation observations. The first improvement is the incorporation of an annual sinusoidal variation in effective clear-sky atmospheric emissivity, based on typical climatological variations in near-surface vapor pressure. The second is the continuous estimation of fractional cloudiness by taking the ratio of observed solar radiation to a modeled clear-sky solar radiation. Previous methods employed observer-estimated fractional cloudiness. Data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program were used to develop these improvements. The estimation of cloudiness was then used to modify the effective clear-sky atmospheric emissivity in order to calculate 30-min averages of downwelling longwave radiation. Monthly mean bias errors (mbe’s) of −9 to +4 W m−2 and root-mean-square errors (rmse’s) of 11–2...