Relationship between clear-sky atmospheric greenhouse effect and deep convection during the Central Equatorial Pacific Experiment: model calculations and satellite observations

We present calculations of total clear-sky greenhouse effect and its partitioning between the lower, middle, and upper troposphere using high-quality balloon soundings of temperature and humidity as input to a radiative transfer model. The soundings were taken from a ship every 6 hours from March 7 to 20, 1993, in the central Pacific. Periods of active or suppressed convection with timescales of the order of days can produce large spatial gradients in clear-sky atmospheric greenhouse trapping in warm, climatologically convective regions. While the sea surface temperature (SST) decreased by 2K from west to east, temperatures above 850mbar showed considerably less variation. -from Authors