The early summertime Saharan heat low: sensitivity of the radiation budget and atmospheric heating to water vapour  and dust aerosol

Alamirew, Netsanet K.; Todd, Martin C.; Ryder, Claire L.; Marsham, John H.; Wang, Yi

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-1241-2018

Articles | Volume 18, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-1241-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Anthropogenic dust and its climate impact

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-1241-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 2

Research article

|

31 Jan 2018

Research article |

| 31 Jan 2018

The early summertime Saharan heat low: sensitivity of the radiation budget and atmospheric heating to water vapour and dust aerosol

Netsanet K. Alamirew, Martin C. Todd, Claire L. Ryder, John H. Marsham, and Yi Wang

Download

Final revised paper (published on 31 Jan 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 15 May 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

SC1: 'review of Alamirew et al.', Christophe Lavaysse, 29 May 2017
- AC3: 'Response to interactive discussion Short Comment (SC) from C. Lavaysse', netsanet alamirew, 30 Oct 2017
RC1: 'Referee comment 1', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Jul 2017
- AC1: 'response to referre #1 comment', netsanet alamirew, 30 Oct 2017
- AC4: 'response to referee #1 comment', netsanet alamirew, 30 Oct 2017
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Oct 2017
- AC2: 'respnse to referee #2', netsanet alamirew, 30 Oct 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by netsanet alamirew on behalf of the Authors (30 Oct 2017)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 Nov 2017) by Jianping Huang

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (13 Nov 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (02 Dec 2017)

ED: Publish as is (02 Dec 2017) by Jianping Huang

AR by netsanet alamirew on behalf of the Authors (11 Dec 2017)

Download

Article (6349 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

This paper quantifies the radiative effects of dust and water vapour in the Saharan heat low. Dust has a warming effect at the top of the atmosphere while cooling the surface. Water vapour has a warming effect both at the top of atmosphere and the surface. We find dust and water vapour have similar effects in driving the variability in the top-of-atmosphere radiative budget, while dust has a stronger effect than water vapour in controlling day-to-day variability of the surface radiative budget.