Atmospheric solar heating in minor absorption bands

Solar radiation is the primary source of energy driving atmospheric and oce anic circulations. Concerned with the huge amount of time required for comp uting radiative transfer in weather and climate models, solar heating in mi nor absorption bands has often been neglected. The individual contributions of these minor bands to the atmospheric heating is small, but collectively they are not negligible. The solar heating in minor bands includes the abs orption due to water vapor in the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) spectral region from 14284 cm(-1) to 25000 cm(-1), the ozone absorption an d Rayleigh scattering in the near infrared, as well as the O-2 and CO2 abso rption in a number of weak bands. Detailed high spectral- and angular-resol ution calculations show that the total effect of these minor absorption is to enhance the atmospheric solar heating by similar to 10%, Depending upon the strength of the absorption and the overlapping among gaseous absorption , different approaches are applied to parameterize these minor absorption. The parameterizations are accurate and require little extra time for comput ing radiative fluxes. They have been efficiently implemented in the various atmospheric models at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, including cloud en semble, mesoscale, and climate models.