Many important greenhouse gases (including water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and ozone) absorb solar radiation. When gas concentrations change, this absorption exerts a radiative forcing that modifies the thermal infrared (‘longwave’) which is predominant for most (ozone being major exception). The nature of differs from longwave in several ways. For example, sign instantaneous can differ b...

Solar diffuse radiation data including global radiation, shortwave and longwave balances, net radiation and sunshine hours have been extensively analyzed to study the variation of diffuse radiation with turbidity and cloud discharges appearing in the form of atmospherics over the tropics. Results of surface radiation measurements at Calcutta, Poona, Delhi and Madras are presented together with ...

29 Recent developments of remote sensing methods for Earth satellite data analysis 30 contribute to our understanding of earthquake related thermal anomalies. It was realized 31 that the thermal heat fluxes over areas of earthquake preparation is a result of air 32 ionization by radon (and other gases) and consequent water vapor condensation on newly 33 formed ions. Latent heat (LH) is released...

AIRS was launched on EOS Aqua on May 4, 2002, together with AMSU-A and HSB, to form a next generation polar orbiting infrared and microwave atmospheric sounding system. AIRS is a grating spectrometer with a number of linear arrays of detectors with each detector sensitive to outgoing radiation in a characteristic frequency vi with a spectral band pass Ovi of roughly vi /1200. AIRS contains 2378...

[1] The forecast atmospheric hydrologic cycle of the Polar version 3.1.1 of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) is examined for December 2006 – November 2007. The domain is similar to the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR), an assimilation of model fields and Arctic observations being conducted partly by the Byrd Polar Research Center. Simulations are performed in 48 h increments initi...

Anomalies of precipitation, cloud, thermodynamic, and radiation variables are analyzed on the large spatial scale defined by the tropical oceans. In particular, relationships between the mean tropical oceanic precipitation anomaly and radiative anomalies are examined. It is found that tropical mean precipitation is well correlated with cloud properties and radiative fields. In particular, the t...

[1] Recent work suggests that short-lived pollutants with mid-latitude origins are contributing to observed warming of the Arctic surface. Candidate mechanisms include an ‘‘aerosol indirect effect’’ associated with increases in cloud longwave emissivity: small cloud droplets associated with polluted conditions are efficient absorbers and emitters of longwave radiation. Here, we argue that the a...