Sensitivity of tropospheric heating rates to aerosols: A modeling study

Book · Sat Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:182804

Hanna, A F; Shankar, U; Mathur, R ^[1]

---

1. North Carolina Supercomputing Center, Research Triangle Park, NC (United States)

The effect of aerosols on the radiation balance is critical to the energetics of the atmosphere. Because of the relatively long residence of specific types of aerosols in the atmosphere and their complex thermal and chemical interactions, understanding their behavior is crucial for understanding global climate change. The authors used the Regional Particulate Model (RPM) to simulate aerosols in the eastern United States in order to identify the aerosol characteristics of specific rural and urban areas these characteristics include size, concentration, and vertical profile. A radiative transfer model based on an improved {delta}-Eddington approximation with 26 spectral intervals spanning the solar spectrum was then used to analyze the tropospheric heating rates associated with these different aerosol distributions. The authors compared heating rates forced by differences in surface albedo associated with different land-use characteristics, and found that tropospheric heating and surface cooling are sensitive to surface properties such as albedo.

• OSTI ID: 182804
• Report Number(s): CONF-940426--; ISBN 0-923204-11-3
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
AEROSOLS
AMBIENT TEMPERATURE
CLIMATIC CHANGE
ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS
EXPERIMENTAL DATA
GLOBAL ASPECTS
HEATING RATE
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
TROPOSPHERE