Climate modeling through radiative‐convective models

Abstract

We present a review of the radiative-convective models that have been used in studies pertaining to the earth's climate. After familiarizing the reader with the theoretical background, modeling methodology, and techniques for solving the radiative transfer equation the review focuses on the published model studies concerning global climate and global climate change. Radiative-convective models compute the globally and seasonally averaged surface and atmospheric temperatures. The computed temperatures are in good agreement with the observed temperatures. The models include the important climatic feedback mechanism between surface temperature and H•.O amount in the atmosphere. The principal weakness of the current models is their inability to simulate the feedback mechanism between surface temperature and cloud cover. It is shown that the value of the critical lapse rate adopted in radiative-convective models for convective adjustment is significantly larger than the observed globally averaged tropospheric lapse rate. The review also summarizes radiative-convective model results for the sensitivity of surface temperature to perturbations in (1) the concentrations of the major and minor optically active trace constituents, (2) aerosols, and (3) cloud amount. A simple analytical model is presented to demonstrate how the surface temperature in a radiative-convective model responds to perturbations.

On the role of the planetary boundary layer depth in the climate system

“…We, however, will focus only on the bulk effects related to large variability of h. Equation (2) immediately reveals several falsifiable propositions: (a) the temperature response to a given flux perturbation should have larger magnitude in the shallower PBL where h is small; (b) the temperature variability should be larger in the shallow PBL; and (c) the temperature change is faster in the shallow PBL. One should observe that the temperature has probably stronger links with radiation processes and atmospheric large-scale dynamics hidden in F T 0 than with the vertical turbulent mixing hidden in h. Manabe and Strikler (1964) and following works with the radiationconvective models (Ramanathan and Coakley, 1978;Randall et al, 1996) have demonstrated that this is not the case for the global scale climate as such. However, it could be the case for small perturbations (e.g.…”

Atmospheric Aerosols: Air Quality and Climate Change Perspectives

“…It has been observed that in north India during winter season, road traffic, air traffic as well as rail traffic are hampered due to extreme foggy conditions during low visibility. 29,30,31 . Atmospheric aerosols affect in two different manners i) Directly and ii) Indirectly.…”

A gallery of simple models from climate physics

“…Further reading: Ramanathan and Coakley (1978), Salby (1996) 4.3. The ocean mixed layer The limitation of applicability of the parameterizations (24) in the proximity of the sea surface has been touched in section 2.2 where, for the atmospheric side, the concept of the constant flux layer was introduced.…”