0. SECTIONS
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1. Dataset
2. Terms of Use
3. Contents
4. Method and Processing


1. DATASET
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Title: The impact of precipitating hydrometeors on the atmospheric radiation budget 

Description: This dataset contains atmospheric radiative fluxes and heating rates. These fluxes and heating rates were calculated in order to quantify the effect of precipitating hydrometeors (particularly rain) on the radiation budget of the atmosphere and thereby determine whether climate and weather models should include a treatment of the radiative effect of rain. The dataset includes 4 files. all_hydro.nc and no_rain.nc contain full resolution SW and LW radiative fluxes at the surface and top of atmosphere for calculations that include all hydrometeors and all hydrometeors except rain, respectively. hydro_rad_effects.nc includes results from additional calculations at a lower resolution. case_study_data.nc includes full vertical profiles of radiative fluxes and heating rates at full resolution for 3 points that were chosen as case studies.

Publication Year: 2018
Creator(s): Peter Hill
Organisation(s): University of Reading
Rights-holder(s): University of Reading

Source(s): Input atmospheric profiles for the calculations came from a Goddard Multiscale Modelling Framework (GMMF) simulation available through the NASA Cloud Library Data Portal (https://portal.nccs.nasa.gov/cloudlibrary/) upon request from Jiun-dar.chern-1@nasa.gov. 
The radiation code used for the calculations is available from the Met Office Science Repository Service (https://code.metoffice.gov.uk/trac/socrates/browser#main/branches/dev/peterhill/r58_hydrometeor_rad_effects).

2. TERMS OF USE
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Copyright University of Reading 2018. This dataset is licensed by the rights-holder(s) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

3. CONTENTS
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File listing

all_hydro.nc : Surface and top of atmosphere, shortwave and longwave irradiances derived from a calculation that included all available hydrometeors (i.e. ice, snow, liquid cloud, rain, graupel and hail). Values are stored at the resolution of the calculations.

no_rain.nc : As all_hydro.nc, but rain is not included in the calculations.

hydro_rad_effects.nc : Surface and top of atmosphere, shortwave and longwave irradiances for the following calculations:
   * all_hydro - included all available hydrometeors (i.e. ice, snow, liquid cloud, rain, graupel and hail)
   * no_rain - included all available hydrometeors except rain 
   * no_graupel - included all available hydrometeors except graupel
   * no_hail - included all available hydrometeors except hail
   * clear_sky - no hydrometeors included.
In contrast to all_hydro.nc and no_rain.nc, results are gridbox scale averages.

case_study_data.nc : Example vertical profiles of both shortwave and longwave radiative fluxes and heating rates for three case studies. Includes values from the no_rain and all_hydro calculations only.

All files are in netCDF-4 format.


4. METHOD and PROCESSING
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For a detailed description of the method see 
Hill, P.G, Chiu, J.C., Allan, R.P. and Chern, J.D. (2018), Should general circulation model radiation schemes include rain? submitted to Journal of Advances in Modelling Earth Systems.