Arctic clouds modulate the surface radiation budget by emitting longwave radiation and reflecting incident shortwave radiation. The Arctic is characterized by high levels of anthropogenic pollution that commonly forms a haze in winter and spring, due to long-range transport of aerosols primarily from Eastern Europe and Russia (Sirois and Barrie, 1999). During the Arctic winter and spring strong...

We review the development of a new type of model for simulation and theory of the tropical atmospheric component of climate variations. These models are referred to as \quasi-equilibrium tropical circulation models", or QTCMs, because they make use of approximations associated with quasi-equilibrium (QE) convective parameterizations originally proposed by Arakawa and Schubert. The formulation u...

SouthernWest Africa (SWA) has a large population that relies on highly variablemonsoon rainfall, yet climate models show little consensus over projected precipitation in this region. Understanding of the current and future climate of SWA is further complicated by rapidly increasing anthropogenic emissions and a lack of surface observations. Using multiple satellite observations, the ERA-Interim...

Through partial bleaching of both visual pigment extracts and cell suspensions we show that the deep-sea stomiid Malacosteus niger, which produces far red bioluminescence, has two visual pigments within its retina which form a rhodopsin/porphyropsin pigment pair with lambda max values around 520 and 540 nm, but lacks the very longwave sensitive visual pigments (lambda max > 550 nm) observed in ...

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 ...

[1] We explore the daily evolution of tropical intraseasonal oscillations in satellite-observed tropospheric temperature, precipitation, radiative fluxes, and cloud properties. The warm/rainy phase of a composited average of fifteen oscillations is accompanied by a net reduction in radiative input into the ocean-atmosphere system, with longwave heating anomalies transitioning to longwave coolin...

[1] Clear-sky longwave radiative feedback processes depicted in climate models prepared for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) are investigated using satellite observations of the clear-sky outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). Estimates of clear-sky longwave radiative damping are derived from regional, seasonal, and interannual sources of variabili...

[1] The contrail radiative forcing induced by human aviation activity is one of the most uncertain contributions to climate forcing. An accurate estimation of global contrail radiative forcing is imperative, and the modeling approach is an effective and prominent method to investigate the sensitivity of contrail forcing to various potential factors. We use a simple offline model framework that ...

The new double-moment microphysics scheme described in Part I of this paper is implemented into a single-column model to simulate clouds and radiation observed during the period 1 April–15 May 1998 of the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) and First International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) Regional Experiment–Arctic Clouds Experiment (FIRE–ACE) field projects. Mean predi...