http://lunar.earth.northwestern.edu/courses/438/pollack1987.pdf

The case for a wet, warm climate on early Mars.

The thermal structure of Titan's atmosphere.

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 H2O 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.

Climate modeling through radiative‐convective models

The atmosphere of a brown dwarf or extrasolar giant planet controls the spectrum of radiation emitted by the object and regulates its cooling over time. Although the study of these atmospheres has been informed by decades of experience modeling stellar and planetary atmospheres, the distinctive characteristics of these objects present unique challenges to forward modeling. In particular, complex chemistry arising from molecule-rich atmospheres, molecular opacity line lists (sometimes running to 10 billion absorption lines or more), multiple cloud-forming condensates, and disequilibrium chemical processes all combine to create a challenging task for any modeling effort. This review describes the process of incorporating these complexities into one-dimensional radiative-convective equilibrium models of substellar objects. We discuss the underlying mathematics as well as the techniques used to model the physics, chemistry, radiative transfer, and other processes relevant to understanding these atmospheres. T...

On the Cool Side: Modeling the Atmospheres of Brown Dwarfs and Giant Planets

Three fast and simple longwave broadband radiation parameterization schemes were tested against a reference narrow-band model in clear sky conditions. The three schemes gave rather similar results. The emissivity dependence on water vapor path length was tuned to give best fit to the reference. The smaller other gas, aerosol and continuum circus were added in a simple fashion both to the radiative cooling and to the longwave downward flux at the surface. Clouds are handled as blackbodies. In the shortwave scheme the attenuation of solar radiation due to variable water vapor and gray clouds, but average ozone and other gas absorption, aerosols and Rayleigh scattering are taken into account and tuned by surface observations of solar flux. The water vapor absorptivity for solar heating was fitted by line-by-line model results.

Fast radiation parameterization schemes for mesoscale and short-range forecast models

A four-stream, multi-layered radiative transfer model has been developed to treat the problem of the transfer of infrared radiation in an atmosphere containing both scatterers and absorbers. Each atmospheric layer is isothermal and contains a uniform concentration of scatterers and absorbers. To facilitate the computations, the infrared spectrum was divided into four bands. In each band empirical transmission functions were fitted by a series of exponential functions. Test calculations of the infrared cooling rate were made using the empirical transmission functions and the fitted transmission functions. The resulting cooling rate profiles exhibit good agreement with each other. A model of a typical urban aerosol was developed using recent experimental results on the spectral dependence of the complex refractive index and the size distributions of aerosols. Atmospheric cooling rates as a function of height were computed on a band by band basis, with and without aerosols, in order to compare the e...

Conway B. Leovy

Papers

Infrared Radiative Transfer in Polluted Atmospheres