mineral dust is produced from both natural and anthropogenic sources. dust aerosols can be transported over long distances in the atmosphere. they reduce the incident shortwave radiation to the surface by absorbing and scattering the solar radiation; thereby leading to a cooling effect at the surface and lower tropospheric temperature. on the other hand, by absorption and re-emission of longwav...

A new one-dimensional radiative equilibrium model is built to analytically evaluate the vertical profile of the Earth's atmospheric radiation entropy flux under the assumption that atmospheric longwave radiation emission behaves as a greybody and shortwave radiation as a diluted blackbody. Results show that both the atmospheric shortwave and net longwave radiation entropy fluxes increase with a...

Satellite observations of temperature, water vapor, precipitation and longwave radiation are used to characterize the variation of the tropical hydrologic and energy budgets associated with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). As the tropical oceans warm during an El Niño event, the precipitation intensity, water vapor mass, and temperature of the tropical atmosphere are observed to increas...

[1] In the context of climate feedback associated with temperature change, there exist two potential mechanisms that affect the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and the downward longwave radiation (DLR). One is the ‘‘Planck’’ effect that determines the blackbody thermal emission at a considered temperature. The other is the ‘‘absorptivity’’ effect, in which a temperature change causes a change...

The variation of aerosols, especially dust aerosol, in time and space plays an important role in climate forcing studies. Aerosols can effectively reduce land surface longwave emission and re-emit energy at a colder temperature, making estimation of downwelling surface longwave radiation (DSLR) with satellite data difficult. Using the latest atmospheric radiative transfer code (MODTRAN 5.0), we...

[1] This paper analyzes the sensitivity of simulated climate and energy balance to changes in soil emissivity over Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and considers how this information may be used to improve emissivity parameterizations in climate models. Analysis of satellite observations suggests that the soil emissivity in current models is too high over this region. Sensitivity tests...

Daily net surface radiation fluxes are estimated for Indian land mass at spatial grid intervals of 0.1 degree. Two approaches are employed to obtain daily net radiation for four sample days viz., November 19, 2013, December 16, 2013, January 8, 2014 and March 20, 2014. Both the approaches compute net shortwave and net longwave fluxes, separately and sum them up to obtain net radiation. The firs...

Geostationary satellites provide information that enables frequent, routine and cost-effective estimates of both downwelling longwave radiation and incident solar radiation for use by agricultural and other applications, at a resolution that cannot be practically matched by ground-based measurements. We develop a new parameterization for downwelling longwave radiation at the earth’s surface tha...