Instantaneous longwave radiative impact of ozone: an application on IASI/MetOp observations

Abstract

Ozone is an important greenhouse gas in terms of anthropogenic radiative forcing (RF). RF calculations for ozone were until recently entirely model based, and significant discrepancies were reported due to different model characteristics. However, new instantaneous radiative kernels (IRKs) calculated from hyperspectral thermal IR satellites have been able to help adjudicate between different climate model RF calculations. IRKs are defined as the sensitivity of the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) flux with respect to the ozone vertical distribution in the full 9.6 μm band. Previous methods applied to measurements from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) on Aura rely on an anisotropy approximation for the angular integration. In this paper, we present a more accurate but more computationally expensive method to calculate these kernels. The method of direct integration is based on similar principles to the anisotropy approximation, but it deals more precisely with the integration of the Jacobians. We describe both methods and highlight their differences with respect to the IRKs and the ozone longwave radiative effect (LWRE), i.e., the radiative impact in OLR due to absorption by ozone, for both tropospheric and total columns, from measurements of the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) onboard MetOp-A. Biases between the two methods vary from −25 to +20 % for the LWRE, depending on the viewing angle. These biases point to the inadequacy of the anisotropy method, especially at nadir, suggesting that the TES-derived LWREs are biased low by around 25 % and that chemistry–climate model OLR biases with respect to TES are underestimated. In this paper we also exploit the sampling performance of IASI to obtain first daily global distributions of the LWRE, for 12 days (the 15th of each month) in 2011, calculated with the direct integration method. We show that the temporal variation of global and latitudinal averages of the LWRE shows patterns which are controlled by changes in the surface temperature and ozone variation due to specific processes, such as the ozone hole in the polar regions and stratospheric intrusions into the troposphere.