This work assessed the impact of aerosol-cloud-radiation (ACR) interactions on U.S. regional ozone and PM2.5 using the NASA Unified Weather Research and Forecasting modeling system. A series of three-month simulations have been carried out for the year 2010, in which the factor separation method has been applied in order to isolate the contributions from aerosol-radiation (AR), aerosol-cloud (A...

This paper presents the results obtained by analysing a set of measurements of surface radiation balance components at a semi-arid location in SE Spain. The relationships between net and surface shortwave radiation were explored by using 38 months of 5 min surface radiation. The study area is covered by sparse clumped shrub-land of different species, although close to the radiometric station Re...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. [1] Improvements in modeling mineral aerosols over southwest Asia are made to the dust scheme in a regional climate...

[1] Understanding how a changing boreal fire regime is likely to influence regional climate requires detailed information about fire effects on the surface radiation budget. We used time series of satellite observations of surface albedo from 2000–2011 and fire perimeters since 1970 to study post-fire changes in surface net shortwave radiation along a latitudinal transect in central Canada. Fir...

The original Shortwave Flux Analysis (SWFA), based on Long and Ackerman (2000) and Long et al. (1999), deals only with daylight shortwave (SW) data. The SWFA algorithm produces continuous estimates of clear-sky downwelling diffuse, direct, and total SW; estimated fractional sky cover; and identification of when the sky was cloudless. This algorithm package is being produced as an Atmospheric Ra...

A description of the coupling of Integrated Biosphere Simulator (IBIS) to Regional Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3) is presented. IBIS introduces several key advantages to RegCM3, most notably vegetation dynamics, the coexistence of multiple plant functional types in the same grid cell, more sophisticated plant phenology, plant competition, explicit modeling of soil/plant biogeochemistry, and a...

Anthropogenically induced climate change is of great current interest because of increases in atmospheric loading of infrared active (greenhouse) gases over the past 150 years and the inferred resultant increase in the flux of infrared radiation in the troposphere. In parallel with the increase in greenhouse gas loadings there has been an increase in loadings of tropospheric aerosols derived fr...

Anthropogenic aerosols influence the earth's radiation balance and climate directly, by scattering shortwave (solar) radiation in cloud-free conditions and indirectly, by increasing concentrations of cloud droplets thereby enhancing cloud shortwave reflectivity. These effects are thought to be significant in the context of changes in the earth radiation budget over the industrial period, exerti...