An important step toward improving radiative transfer codes in general circulation models (GCMs) is to thoroughly evaluate them either by comparison to measurements directly or by comparing them to other data-validated radiation models. The Rapid Radiative Transfer Model (RRTM) shortwave (SW) radiation model accurately reproduces direct beam fluxes from the Line-by-Line Radiative Transfer Model...

Using a numerical model of solar radiative transfer that is calibrated against benchmark computations, it is shown that atmospheric water vapor, together with the microphysical characteristics of water drops (liquid water path and effective radius), plays an important role in the total solar spectrum reflection and absorption in overcast skies. For any specific cloud type, the water vapor colum...

We have evaluated the effect of shortwave ultraviolet radiation on bacterial levels in an operating theatre, both in experimental conditions and during 20 hip operations. When compared with the use of sham blue light, there was a significant reduction in the number of bacteria. The reduced level was comparable with that suggested for ultraclean air ventilation systems.

As a second step of the international program of Intercomparison of Radiation Codes Used in Climate Models (ICRCCM), an intercomparison of shortwave radiation models was initiated. Among the 26 codes that participated in the comparison were very detailed (line-by-line), narrow-band (high-spectral resolution), as well as highly parameterized (low-spectral resolution) models. A considerable sprea...

Accurate simulation of radiative transfer is a very important aspect in climate modeling. For microclimate models particular, it not only to simulate primary but also secondary fluxes great detail, i.e., emitted longwave and reflected shortwave radiation. As there are always limitations regarding computational effort memory, these commonly implemented using simplified approaches. To overcome si...

Abstract Slope and aspect are important topographic elements for thermodynamics dynamics of atmospheric circulation, especially local radiation precipitation. We propose a simple realistic statistical method based on trigonometric function transformation to calculate sub-grid slope describing the orographic characteristics complex areas over globe. It is found that transformed conditional proba...

Idealized climate modeling studies often choose to neglect spatiotemporal variations in solar radiation, but doing so comes with an important decision about how to average solar radiation in space and time. Since both clear-sky and cloud albedo are increasing functions of the solar zenith angle, one can choose an absorptionweighted zenith angle that reproduces the spatialor time-mean absorbed s...

The effect of variations in land cover on mean radiant temperature (T mrt ) is explored through a simple scheme developed within the radiation model SOLWEIG. Outgoing longwave radiation is parameterised using surface temperature observations on a grass and an asphalt surface, whereas outgoing shortwave radiation is modelled through variations in albedo for the different surfaces. The influence ...