On the Radiation Budget of the Troposphere over the Northern Hemisphere (II)

Hemispheric distribution

Abstract

In Part II, the normal distributions of various quantities related to the radiation budgets of a tropospheric column, the earth's surface, and the troposphere-earth system are presented over the northern hemisphere for January and July.
In general, the distribution of radiation quantities has mainly zonal characteristics and intense north-south gradients in January, but has mainly cellular characteristics in July closely corresponding to the distribution of sea-land or the cloud cover. The annual mean value of planetary albedo for the troposphere-earth system averaged over the northern hemisphere is 0.374, which is slightly larger than the 0.34 of Houghton but smaller than the 0.40 adopted by Budyko. Both spatial and seasonal variations of the radiation budget of the troposphere, which contribute directly to the diabatic heating field in the troposphere, are relatively small compared with those of the radiation budgets of the atmosphere-earth system and of the earth's surface.