In an effort to attain a quantitative understanding of the temporal and spatial variability of the tropical radiation budgets and the cloud-radiative forcing, a complete annual cycle of measurements by the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite scanning radiometer is analyzed. / Results show the existence of strong diurnal variation in the longwave emission over land and desert scenes and in the reflected shortwave radiation for all scenes. A bias in the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment scene identification algorithm against clear tropical scenes at night is evident in the longwave diurnal variation results. Substantial east-west variation is exhibited in the radiation and the cloud forcing components for some latitude zones. The largest seasonal changes in the radiation and the cloud forcing components are associated with the Asian summer monsoon and the migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Cloud forcing results show a strong dependence of net forcing on cloud type, with small values for convective clouds and large negative values for stratiform clouds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.59526 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Chang, Tin Yee |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Meteorology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001073591, proquestno: AAIMM63658, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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