PNNL

Abstract

Radiative heating of the atmosphere affects cloud evolution on the cloud scale and it influences large-scale vertical motion. Obtaining good estimates of radiative heating rate profiles has been difficult due to a lack of cloud profile observations. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program has been measuring cloud property distributions at sites around the globe including three in the tropical western Pacific (TWP) region. We have analyzed a month of these remote sensing observations at Manus and Nauru to calculate time series of vertical cloud property profiles and radiative heating rates. This data set will be an important tool for describing radiative processes in the tropics and assessing the simulation of these processes in dynamical models.