Satellite cloud analyses can provide a long-term record of microphysical, macrophysical and radiative properties over a large area. However, to have confidence in these retrievals, the results must be compared with ground truth or reliable reference sources. The layered bispectral threshold method (LBTM; Minnis et al. 1995) has been used to derive cloud and radiative properties from the eighth ...

An understanding of radiative transfer in sea ice is critical to understanding the heat and mass balance of the Arctic. Radiative transfer affects such processes as surface melting, ice-albedo feedback, solar heating of the upper ocean, and internal heat storage within the ice. Large temporal changes in the physical state of the ice cover cause large changes in its radiative properties, particu...

We examined the effect of individual bubble clouds on remote-sensing reflectance of the ocean with a 3-D Monte Carlo model of radiative transfer. The concentrations and size distribution of bubbles were defined based on acoustical measurements of bubbles in the surface ocean. The light scattering properties of bubbles for various void fractions were calculated using Mie scattering theory. We sh...

A secondary optimization technique was proposed to estimate the temperature-dependent thermal conductivity and absorption coefficient. In the proposed method, the stochastic particle swarm optimization was applied to solve the inverse problem. The coupled radiation and conduction problem was solved in a 1D absorbing, emitting, but non-scattering slab exposed to a pulse laser. It is found that i...

This work presents the assessment of the aerosol direct radiative effects for a special episode of transatlantic transport of a biomass burning plume, performed over Granada, south-eastern Iberian Peninsula, on 20 August 2007. The knowledge of aerosol radiative impact requires an accurate determination of their optical and microphysical properties, which are obtained here using ground-based rem...

The effects of cirrus clouds on the radiation budget of the earth and the atmosphere, and hence their impact on weather and climate processes, have been articulated by Liou (1986, 1992). Cirrus clouds are frequently finite and highly inhomogeneous based on satellite and replicator sounding observations (Ou et al. 1995; Heymsfield and Miloshevich 1993). Potential effects of the cloud geometry an...

Carbonaceous aerosols (CA) emitted by fossil and biomass fuels consist of black carbon (BC), a strong absorber of solar radiation, and organic matter (OM). OM scatters as well as absorbs solar radiation. The absorbing component of OM, which is ignored in most climate models, is referred to as brown carbon (BrC). Model estimates of the global CA radiative forcing range from 0 to 0.7 Wm(-2), to b...

[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 ...

This paper summarizes the evidence of the ultraviolet properties of dust grains found in starburst galaxies. Observations of starburst galaxies clearly show that the 2175 Å feature is weak or absent. This can be the result of radiative transfer effects (mixing the dust and stars) or due to dust grains which do not have this feature. Spherical DIRTY radiative transfer models imply that it is not...