Abstract

Abstract The radiative transfer model from NCAR’s general circulation model CCM3 is modified to calculate monthly radiative fluxes and heating rates from monthly observations of cloud properties from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project and temperature and humidity from ECMWF analysis. The calculation resolves the three-dimensional structure of monthly to interannual variations of radiative heating and is efficient enough to allow a wide range of sensitivity tests. Two modifications to the radiative transfer model improve the calculation of shortwave (SW) fluxes in a cloudy atmosphere. The first replaces an existing nonphysical parameterization of partially cloudy skies with a physically motivated one that increases substantially the accuracy of calculated SW fluxes while increasing the computational time of the calculation by only 10%. The second modification allows the specification of generalized cloud overlap properties. With these modifications, radiative fluxes are calculated from o...

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