An Examination of the Clear-Sky Solar Absorption over the Central Equatorial Pacific: Observations versus Models

Estimate of the Cloud and Aerosol Effects on the Surface Radiative Flux Based on the Measurements and the Transfer Model Calculations

“…More recently, some studies reevaluated the surface clear-sky flux utilizing more precise surface observations (Chou and Zhao, 1997;Conant et al, 1997). These studies proposed statistical methods to estimate the clear-sky flux utilizing the surface radiation measurements with high temporal resolutions.…”

“…These studies proposed statistical methods to estimate the clear-sky flux utilizing the surface radiation measurements with high temporal resolutions. Conant et al (1997) proposed the peak frequency density method to estimate the clear-sky flux utilizing radiation measurements of the CEPEX (Central Equatorial Pacific Experiment) with a high temporal resolution (10-sec). This method is unique because the precision of the clear-sky measurements (or its variation depending on the atmospheric conditions) is obtained statistically with the transmittance estimate.…”

“…It was shown in the previous studies, that even with the high temporal resolution data, purely observational estimates of the clear-sky flux cannot avoid the uncertainties resulting from the presense of clouds, finite cloud effects, water vapor variations, and aerosol loading. On the other hand, these studies indicated that radiative transfer calculations with high accuracy methods are quite promising (Chow and Zhao, 1997;Conant et al, 1997).…”

A Possible Link of Aerosol and Cloud Radiations to Asian Summer Monsoon and Its Implication in Long-range Numerical Weather Prediction

“…We note that stations from which they collected data are mostly located over the land. Conant et al (1997) insisted that conventional radiation schemes do not have serious errors in clear sky cases over the central equatorial Pacific, where aerosols are very few. In that case, discrepancies suggested by Wild et al may be, to a considerable extent, associated with clouds and aerosols over the land.…”

Final report for the project "Improving the understanding of surface-atmosphere radiative interactions by mapping surface reflectance over the ARM CART site" (award DE-FG02-02ER63351)

“…The Li et al model has been used to generate a global climatology of SSNR [Li and Leighton, 1993] with an accuracy of 5 Wm -2 for monthly mean fluxes [Li et al, 1995]; good accuracies were also reported in other studies [Conant et al, 1997;Ramanathan et al, 1995;Waliser et al, 1996Waliser et al, , 1999Jing and Cess, 1998]. The model is currently used as one of the Cloud and the Earth's Radiant Energy System algorithms generating the global SSNR [Wielicki et al, 1996].…”