Effect of improving representation of horizontal and vertical cloud structure on the Earth's global radiation budget. Part II: The global effects

Abstract

AbstractReliably representing both horizontal cloud inhomogeneity and vertical cloud overlap is fundamentally important for the radiation budget of a general circulation model. Here, we build on the work of Part I of this two‐part paper by applying a pair of parametrizations that account for horizontal inhomogeneity and vertical overlap to global re‐analysis data. These are applied both together and separately in an attempt to quantify the effects of poor representation of the two components on radiation budget.Horizontal inhomogeneity is accounted for using the ‘Tripleclouds’ scheme, which uses two regions of cloud in each layer of a gridbox as opposed to one; vertical overlap is accounted for using ‘exponential‐random’ overlap, which aligns vertically continuous cloud according to a decorrelation height. These are applied to a sample of scenes from a year of ERA‐40 data. The largest radiative effect of horizontal inhomogeneity is found to be in areas of marine stratocumulus; the effect of vertical overlap is found to be fairly uniform, but with larger individual short‐wave and long‐wave effects in areas of deep, tropical convection. The combined effect of the two parametrizations is found to reduce the magnitude of the net top‐of‐atmosphere (TOA) cloud radiative forcing by 2.25 W m−2, with shifts of up to 10 W m−2 in areas of marine stratocumulus.The effects on radiation budget of the uncertainty in our parametrizations is also investigated. It is found that the uncertainty in the impact of horizontal inhomogeneity is of order ±60%, while the uncertainty in the impact of vertical overlap is much smaller. This suggests an insensitivity of the radiation budget to the exact nature of the global decorrelation height distribution derived in Part I. Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Society