Chuck N. Long — NOAA- Earth System Research Laboratory
Julia Flaherty — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Category
Radiation
Description
Joint frequency distribution of shortwave transmissivity and sky cover for each cloud type over all sites. Frequency is normalized to 1.0 in each sky-cover bin. Bins with frequency of less than 0.001 are not plotted.Mean and median transmissivity for each skycover bin are also plotted for cloud-fraction bins that contain at least 0.5% of the total data points for that cloud type.
The ARM Program has been operating two tropical western Pacific equatorial sites for more than a decade on Manus, Papua New Guinea and the island nation of Nauru; and a site at Darwin Australia since late 2002. Analysis of these long term data show that the Nauru site surface radiative energy budget and cloudiness is significantly influenced by ENSO, whereas the Manus site shows little intraseasonal or interannual variability. The Darwin site experiences large variability due to its monsoon climate. Using data from 1999 through 2010 inclusive we will present details of the surface radiative energy budget, cloud amounts, and cloud radiative effects in the context of ENSO, the Darwin monsoon, and by cloud type using a simple cloud classification system from cloud radar/lidar observations.
Lead PI
Chuck N. Long — NOAA- Earth System Research Laboratory
