Earth Syst. Sci.

Data, 13, 617–630, 2021

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-617-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Atmospheric radiative profiles during EUREC4 A

Anna Lea Albright1, , Benjamin Fildier2, , Ludovic Touzé-Peiffer1, , Robert Pincus3,4 , Jessica Vial1 ,
and Caroline Muller2
1 Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Sorbonne University, Paris, France
2 Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
3 Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
4 NOAA Physical Sciences Lab, Boulder, CO, USA
 These authors contributed equally to this work.

Correspondence: Anna Lea Albright ([email protected])

Received: 7 September 2020 – Discussion started: 29 September 2020

Revised: 22 December 2020 – Accepted: 6 January 2021 – Published: 24 February 2021

Abstract. The couplings among clouds, convection, and circulation in trade-wind regimes remain a fundamen-
tal puzzle that limits our ability to constrain future climate change. Radiative heating plays an important role
in these couplings. Here we calculate clear-sky radiative profiles from 2580 in situ soundings (1068 dropsondes
and 1512 radiosondes) collected during the field campaign EUREC4 A (Elucidating the role of clouds–circulation
coupling in climate). EUREC4 A took place in the downstream trades of the western tropical Atlantic in January–
February 2020. We describe the method used to calculate these cloud-free, aerosol-free radiative profiles. We then
present preliminary results sampling variability at multiple scales, from the variability across all soundings to
groupings by diurnal cycle and mesoscale organization, as well as individual soundings associated with elevated
moisture layers. We also perform an uncertainty assessment and find that the errors resulting from uncertainties
in observed sounding profiles and ERA5 reanalysis employed as upper and lower boundary conditions are small.
The present radiative profile data set can provide important additional details missing from calculations based
on passive remote sensing and aid in understanding the interplay of radiative heating with dynamic and ther-
modynamic variability in the trades. The data set can also be used to investigate the role of low-level radiative
cooling gradients in generating shallow circulations. All data are archived and freely available for public access
on AERIS (Albright et al., 2020a, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.25326/78).

1 Introduction 2020). Among all physical processes involved in shallow

convection, atmospheric radiative cooling emerges as key to
The EUREC4 A (Elucidating the role of clouds–circulation the coupling between low-level circulations and convection.
coupling in climate) field campaign, which took place in Understanding the dynamics driven by variations in radiative
January and February 2020 in the downstream trades of the heating rates and the potential relationship to the mesoscale
western tropical Atlantic, was designed to explain the cou- organization of clear and cloudy regions was one motivation
plings among clouds, convection, and circulation in trade- for the campaign (Bony et al., 2017).
wind regimes and understand the role of this interplay in cli- A characteristic feature of the trade-wind vertical moisture
mate change (Bony et al., 2017). Shallow trade-wind clouds profile is a sharp humidity gradient between the moist ma-
cover large parts of tropical oceans (Wood, 2012), yet their rine boundary layer and the dry, subsiding free troposphere
response to warming remains largely unknown, and uncer- around 2 km (Riehl et al., 1951; Malkus, 1958). This charac-
tainty in shallow convective processes are the cause of large teristic vertical moisture structure has important implications
uncertainties in climate projections (Bony and Dufresne, for radiative cooling profiles, but it is difficult to observe with
2005; Vial et al., 2013; Sherwood et al., 2014; Zelinka et al., satellite remote sensing (Stevens et al., 2017). Indeed, mois-

Published by Copernicus Publications.

618 A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A

ture profile features, such as the sharp decreases in moisture profiles, we employ level 3 data which have been interpo-
at the top of the marine boundary layer or elevated moisture lated into a common altitude grid with 10 m spacing (Stephan
layers, are smaller than typical weighting functions of even et al., 2020; George et al., 2021). We select dropsondes and
hyperspectral instruments (e.g., Maddy and Barnet, 2008; radiosondes that have measurements on more than 10 atmo-
Schmit et al., 2009; Menzel et al., 2018), especially in the spheric levels in total. This filter suffices to remove failed
lowest 3 km corresponding to the weakest absorption lines soundings and results in an input data set consisting of 1068
(Chazette et al., 2014). The lack of informative observations atmospheric profiles from dropsondes and 1512 profiles from
means that the vertical profile of water vapor in large-scale radiosondes. The minimum and maximum levels, zmin and
atmospheric analyses does not represent the fine-scale mois- zmax , measured by each sonde are reported in the final data
ture structure indicated by soundings (Pincus et al., 2017). set.
Errors in the vertical moisture structure estimated from pas- Figure 1a shows the geographic and temporal distributions
sive remote sensing produce corresponding errors in radia- of the sondes used to calculate the radiative profiles. Ra-
tive cooling profiles computed from retrievals and/or analy- diosondes were launched from a network of one land sta-
ses, making in situ soundings especially valuable. tion and four research vessels within a region ranging from
Here we calculate radiative profiles from 2580 soundings 51–60◦ W to 6–16◦ N. On land, radiosondes were launched
(1068 from dropsondes and 1512 from radiosondes) col- from the Barbados Cloud Observatory (BCO) located on
lected during EUREC4 A, whose network of observations a promontory on the easternmost point of Barbados called
provided extensive sampling of the tropical trade-wind en- Deebles Point (13.16◦ N, 59.43◦ W) where it is exposed
vironment. Similar studies have been conducted over con- to relatively undisturbed easterly trade winds. The fleet of
tinents as part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement four research vessels includes the French research vessel
program (Kato et al., 1997; Mlawer et al., 1998) over the L’Atalante, two German research vessels Maria S. Merian
western Pacific warm-pool region as part of the Coupled (MS-Merian) and Meteor, and the American research ves-
Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (Guichard et al., sel from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis-
2000) and over the western tropical Atlantic, albeit focused tration (NOAA) Ronald H. Brown (RH-Brown). Dropson-
on transported Saharan dust layers (Gutleben et al., 2019). des were launched from both the German High Altitude
The present radiative profiles have the potential to comple- and Long Range Research Aircraft (HALO) and the United
ment and further what can be learned from calculations based States Lockheed WP-3D Orion from the NOAA (WP-3D).
on passive remote sensing. In addition, this data set may help HALO typically flew at an altitude of 30 000 ft (approxi-
in understanding how low-level gradients in radiative cooling mately 9 km), following a circular flight pattern with a 90 km
fuel shallow circulations, as observed to emerge in remote radius centered at 13.3◦ N, 57.7◦ W. When launching sondes,
sensing and large eddy simulations (L’Ecuyer et al., 2008; the WP-3D flew at 24 000 ft (approximately 7 km), releasing
Stephens et al., 2012; Seifert et al., 2015). These shallow cir- sondes along both linear and circular patterns in the region
culations are speculated to influence the mesoscale spatial covered by HALO, as well as further to the east close to the
organization of shallow convection, a question at the core of nominal position of RH-Brown.
EUREC4 A (Bony et al., 2020; Stevens et al., 2020). Radiosondes were launched every 4 h, daily from 8 Jan-
In Sect. 2, we describe the data, the radiative transfer code, uary to 19 February 2020, approximately synchronously
and the procedure underlying the calculation of the radiative from each platform. Given that the time-lag between ascend-
profiles. We then present initial results to open the discus- ing and descending radiosondes is on the order of hours and
sion on questions that could be explored with these radiative that there is substantial horizontal drift between the ascent
profiles (Sect. 3). Lastly, we perform an uncertainty assess- and descent, we chose to compute separate radiative profiles
ment (Sect. 4) and find that errors resulting from uncertain- for ascending and descending radiosondes. For dropsondes,
ties in the sea surface skin temperature, in situ soundings, and HALO flights lasted approximately 8 h, yielding roughly 72
ERA5 reanalysis used as boundary conditions are modest. sondes per flight. The WP-3D undertook three night flights
which allows for a better characterization of the diurnal cy-
cle, together with the radiosondes launched during the night
2 Data and methods
(Fig. 1b).
2.1 Radiosonde and dropsonde data
We refer the reader to Stephan et al. (2020) and George et
al. (2021) for a complete description of the radiosonde and
From 8 January to 19 February, over 2500 atmospheric dropsonde data sets, respectively, and Bony et al. (2017) and
soundings were conducted using dropsondes and radioson- Stevens et al. (2021) for an overview of the campaign’s sci-
des over the western tropical Atlantic Ocean south and east entific motivations and measurement strategy.
of Barbados. As the sondes fall or ascend, their simple au-
tonomous sensors, equipped with a GPS receiver, measure
the vertical profiles of pressure, temperature, relative humid-
ity, and instantaneous horizontal wind. To calculate radiative

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A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A 619

Figure 1. (a) The EUREC4 A sounding network: 1068 soundings from dropsondes (white) and 1512 from radiosondes (coral). We employ
810 dropsondes launched from HALO and 258 dropsondes from the WP-3D to calculate radiative profiles, as well as 325, 344, 156, 377, and
310 radiosondes launched from L’Atalante, BCO, MS-Merian, Meteor, and RH-Brown, respectively. Background colors show sea surface
skin temperature (SSTskin ) from ERA5 reanalysis at 0.25◦ resolution averaged over January and February. (b) The diurnal distribution of the
1068 dropsondes (blue) and 1512 radiosondes (coral) with sonde launch time are binned in 10 min intervals.

2.2 Radiative transfer calculation lated onto a 1 hPa vertical grid and then merged with
temperature and specific humidity from ERA5 reanaly-
The radiative transfer code used here, RRTMGP (Rapid Ra- ses in the following manner. Sonde measurements be-
diative Transfer Model for general circulation models, Paral- low 40 m are first truncated for all sondes; radioson-
lel) (Pincus et al., 2019), is a plane-parallel correlated-k two- des do not provide data in this surface layer because of
stream model based on state-of-the-art spectroscopic data deck heating effects on ships (Stephan et al., 2020), and
for gas and condensate optics. It is based on line parame- we apply the same filter to dropsondes for consistency.
ters from Atmospheric and Environmental Research and the The ERA5 profiles at hourly and 0.25◦ resolution (Hers-
MT_CKD water vapor continuum absorption model (Mlawer bach et al., 2020) are linearly interpolated temporally
et al., 2012). The calculation of radiative profiles from ra- and spatially to the time, latitude, and longitude of the
diosonde and dropsonde data then proceeds in the following sounding. ERA5 values are used above the highest level
way. measured by each sonde to extend the observed sound-
ings vertically to 0.1 hPa and account for the effect of
1. Vertical soundings of temperature, pressure, and water
high-altitude thermodynamic variability on the radiative
vapor specific humidity at 10 m resolution are interpo-

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620 A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A

cooling profiles below. To obtain the lower boundary ual profiles showing the influence of sharp vertical moisture
condition, we linearly interpolate the ERA5 sea surface gradients on radiative heating rates.
skin temperature (SSTskin ) also at hourly and 0.25◦ res-
olution (Hersbach et al., 2020) to the time, longitude, 3.1 Variability across soundings
and latitude and where the sounding was launched.
A distribution of longwave, shortwave, and net heating rates,
2. CO2 concentrations are set to the present day value of as well as large-scale thermodynamic quantities, are shown
414 ppm (parts per million), while CH4 , O3 , and N2 O in Fig. 2. Local extrema in the median shortwave, longwave,
concentrations are taken from the standard tropical at- and net heating rates occur near 2 km (Fig. 2d, e, f) and
mosphere profile of Garand et al. (2001). are associated with the rapid decrease in specific and rela-
3. The set of resulting profiles is then used as input for tive humidity at this level (Fig. 2b, c). The top of the plan-
RRTMGP to derive upwelling and downwelling clear- etary boundary layer or interface between the moist marine
sky radiative fluxes in the shortwave and longwave boundary layer and dry free troposphere above is expected to
ranges of the spectrum. The calculation uses a spec- occur around 2 km in the trades (Malkus, 1958; Cao et al.,
trally uniform surface albedo of 0.07 and a spectrally 2007; Stevens et al., 2017). The spread in specific and rela-
uniform surface emissivity of 0.98, typical values for tive humidity is greater than that in temperature, suggesting a
tropical oceans. strong role for moisture variability on the variability in radia-
tive heating rates. On average, longwave cooling is stronger
Dropsondes and radiosondes drift horizontally as they rise than shortwave heating such that net heating rates are largely
and/or fall (Fig. 1a), which could lead to slight errors due negative from the surface up to 10 km with a median value
to aliasing of horizontal variability in moisture content into around −1 K/day. Additional local minima in longwave heat-
vertical variability. This potential source error is less pro- ing are observed around 3 and 5 km between the 5 % and
nounced for dropsondes than for radiosondes due to their 25 % quantiles. These local minima could, for instance, cor-
faster speed of travel through the troposphere. respond to the radiative effect of elevated moisture layers
We compute radiative fluxes and heating rates only for the arising from convection detraining moisture at these higher
gaseous component of the atmosphere without explicitly tak- levels, albeit less frequently, or aerosol layers associated with
ing into account cloud or aerosol properties. These radiative increased water vapor concentrations (Stevens et al., 2017;
profiles are therefore clear-sky and aerosol-free. The sound- Wood et al., 2018; Kuan-Ting et al., 2018; O et al., 2018;
ings do, however, capture the water vapor structure, including Gutleben et al., 2019).
regions of high humidity in cloud areas and aerosol layers. We next partition radiative heating variability into its vari-
Cloud cover in trade-wind regimes is relatively low, between ability in time (e.g., diurnal cycle, day-to-day variability) and
10 % (Nuijens et al., 2015) and 20 % (Medeiros and Nuijens, regarding the spatial characteristics of the convection field
2016) for active clouds, so cloud-free or clear-sky profiles (e.g., the spatial distribution of clear and cloudy regions).
are representative of the thermodynamic environment. Tak-
ing into account the influence of cloud liquid water would
3.2 Diurnal cycle and day-to-day variability
require a number of ad hoc assumptions about microphys-
ical and optical properties within clouds (see for instance Figure 3 gives an overview of the diurnal variability in ra-
Guichard et al., 2000). Similarly, we do not directly repre- diative heating, which has been implicated in the diurnal
sent the radiative effect of mineral dust aerosols. The dom- cycle of convection and cloudiness (e.g., Gray and Jacob-
inant aerosol radiative effect in this region has been shown son, 1977; Randall and Tjemkes, 1991; Ruppert and John-
to result from the covariance of aerosols with water vapor son, 2016). Shortwave radiative heating follows the solar cy-
such that aerosols tend to be associated with elevated mois- cle. Longwave heating rates show less diurnal variability and
ture layers (Gutleben et al., 2019, 2020). Dust aerosol layers have approximately the same amplitude (with an opposite
are, moreover, more common in the summer than in winter sign) as shortwave heating rates during daytime. This com-
(Lonitz et al., 2015). We leave open the possibility that direct pensation between longwave cooling and shortwave heating
scattering by dust aerosols has an additional role on radiative results in a daytime net heating rate that is slightly posi-
heating rates but do not have the coincident data to appropri- tive in the lower 2 km. The daytime heating contributes to
ately address this question for all soundings. stabilizing the lower atmosphere, disfavoring convection. At
night, strong radiative cooling destabilizes the lower tropo-
3 Preliminary results and discussion sphere and strengthens convection. The maximum nighttime
longwave cooling occurs slightly above 2 km, with secondary
This section includes a first exploration of the data set. We cooling peaks occurring around 4 and 6 km. During daytime,
examine radiative variability at different scales – across all the peak in stabilizing radiative heating appears slightly be-
soundings, at the diurnal timescale, and according to differ- low 2 km. This difference in the height of peak radiative heat-
ent patterns of mesoscale organization – as well as in individ- ing, albeit of different sign, could reflect differences in the

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A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A 621

Figure 2. Temperature (a), specific humidity (b), and relative humidity (c) (with respect to ice for T < 0 ◦ C) from EUREC4 A dropsonde and
radiosonde data. Shortwave (d), longwave (e), and net (f) heating rates calculated from EUREC4 A dropsonde and radiosonde data using the
radiative transfer code RRTMGP. The center traces are the median profiles, and the medium and light gray shadings indicate the 25 %–75 %
and 5 %–95 % intervals, respectively. For the shortwave, the median, and the interquartile ranges are calculated using daytime values only.

height of the moist, convecting layer over the diurnal cycle: a the peak of longwave cooling appears to correspond to the
shallower marine boundary layer during the day that deepens rising location of the interface between the moist, convect-
at night (Vial et al., 2019). These considerations highlight the ing layer below and dry free troposphere above (not shown).
potential for subtle interactions among radiation, convection, The persistence and evolution of radiative heating patterns
and cloudiness on the diurnal timescale. could be tied to larger-scale synoptic moisture activity or to
Figure 4 shows the day-to-day evolution of the shortwave the evolution of mesoscale organization patterns.
(top), longwave (middle), and net (bottom) heating rates de-
rived from radiosondes launched at BCO. In the shortwave
and net heating rates, the daily stripes are due to zero short- 3.3 Radiative signatures of mesoscale patterns of cloud
wave heating during the night. In the longwave component organization
alone, the amplitude of the diurnal cycle is less evident. Re-
garding the day-to-day variability both in the shortwave and We next aggregate radiative heating rates spatially. Fig-
the longwave components, trends in the height evolution of ure 5 illustrates four representative cases of the fish–
the radiative heating maxima appear to persist over several gravel–flower–sugar classification established previously for
days. These trends are likely due to variations in humidity mesoscale (20–2000 km) organization patterns of clear and
(e.g., Dopplick, 1972; Jeevanjee and Fueglistaler, 2020) and cloudy regions (Bony et al., 2020; Stevens et al., 2020).
are consistent with the presence of multi-day trends in mois- These cloud organization patterns were identified visually
ture observed at BCO during the campaign (see Fig. 13 in from satellite imagery and correspond to differences in large-
Stevens et al., 2021). At the end of the campaign, the rise in scale environmental conditions (Bony et al., 2020). They are
also observed to have different top-of-the-atmosphere radia-

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622 A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A

Figure 3. Diurnal composite of shortwave (a), longwave (b), and net (c) clear-sky heating rates binned in 10 min intervals. Colored shadings
indicate heating rates (in units of K/day). The data are plotted with respect to local solar time to simplify the interpretation of the diurnal
cycle. White indicates the absence of data. We note that some variability, such as in the nighttime longwave radiative cooling variability,
could result from different numbers of sondes launched throughout the diurnal cycle (as illustrated in Fig. 1b).

tive effects (Bony et al., 2020). As outlined in Stevens et al. is associated with a moister lower troposphere between 1 and
(2020), sugar refers to a “dusting” of small, shallow clouds 3 km and slightly drier free troposphere above 4 km. This ver-
with low reflectivity and a random spatial distribution. Gravel tical moisture distribution may give rise to the observed ver-
clouds tend to be deeper than sugar (up to 3–4 km), to have tical variability in radiative heating rates with larger peaks in
little stratiform cloudiness, to precipitate, and to organize the mean profile (Fig. 5e) and standard deviation (Fig. 5h) in
along apparent gust fronts or cold pools at the 20–200 km radiative heating observable between 2 and 4 km likely cor-
scales. Fish are skeletal networks (often fishbone-like) of responding to strong humidity gradients at these levels.
clouds at the 200–2000 km scale with stratiform cloud lay-
ers; the fish pattern is often associated with extratropical in-
trusions. Flowers are circular features defined by their strat- 3.4 Effect of sharp moisture gradients on radiative
iform cloud elements. Both fish and flowers are surrounded heating profiles
by large swaths of clear air.
We choose 4 days as an example of the large-scale envi- Figure 6 highlights the radiative signatures of elevated mois-
ronmental and radiative signature of each pattern given the ture layers which can persist for multiple hours at inver-
spatial pattern observable in the GOES-16 satellite images sion levels (Stevens et al., 2017; Wood et al., 2018; Gut-
in the HALO flight path shown by the white circle. We plot leben et al., 2019). We focus in detail on two thermody-
daily mean profiles for temperature, specific humidity, and namic and radiative heating profiles of a particular elevated
relative humidity (Fig. 5a, b, c), as well as shortwave, long- moisture layer extending to 4 km alongside GOES-16 im-
wave, and net radiative heating rates (Fig. 5d, e, f). These ages (Fig. 6i, j) corresponding to these soundings. This struc-
profiles were calculated from approximately 70 HALO drop- ture persisted for at least 4 h on 24 January 2020, and we
sondes launched during the 8 h flight on each day. We also plot thermodynamic conditions and radiative heating profiles
plot the standard deviation of radiative heating for each flight sampled 3 h apart at 12:55 and 15:55 UTC (see Fig. 6). A
(Fig. 5g, h, i). As a first approximation, the standard deviation striking feature is the sharp peak in longwave cooling at the
of daily radiative heating profiles acts as a proxy for spatial top of the moisture layer of nearly −20 K/day at 15:55 UTC
variability in radiative heating rates. corresponding to the strong humidity gradient, with relative
Spatial variability in radiative heating has been shown to humidity decreasing by nearly 70 % in 100 m (Fig. 6c, d).
drive shallow circulations (e.g., Naumann et al., 2019) and Although we calculate clear-sky profiles only, the present
affect convective organization (e.g., Bretherton et al., 2005; work could be extended to account for the radiative effect of
Muller and Held, 2012). In this illustrative example, the dif- cloud liquid water, which could be used, for instance, to in-
ferences in the mean and standard deviation of the radiative vestigate the radiative effect of geometrically and optically
heating rates hint at a role for differences in radiative cooling thin “veil clouds” persisting at inversion levels (Wood et al.,
rates in the onset or maintenance of mesoscale patterns of or- 2018; Kuan-Ting et al., 2018; O et al., 2018), such as those
ganization. For instance, the fish pattern on 22 January 2020 illustrated by the flight photographs (Fig. 6a, e). Over global
oceans, approximately half of low clouds do not fully atten-

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A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A 623

Figure 4. Shortwave (a), longwave (b), and net (c) heating rates at BCO during EUREC4 A from 19 January to 17 February. The heating
rates are calculated from radiosondes launched at BCO. Heating rates are in color (in units of K/day). White indicates the absence of data.

uate space-borne lidar, suggesting that these optically thin 4 Uncertainty assessment
clouds contribute significantly to total cloud cover estimates
(Leahy et al., 2012) and could have an important radiative To evaluate the robustness of our results and ensure good
impact (e.g., Kuan-Ting et al., 2018). use of this data set, we performed several uncertainty assess-
ments by perturbing the SSTskin , in situ moisture data, and
ERA profiles used. We also included in the data set the mini-
mum and maximum levels, zmin and zmax , measured by each
sonde. Unless indicated otherwise, the errors reported below

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624 A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A

Figure 5. Thermodynamic (a–c), daily mean radiative heating (d–f), and daily standard deviation of radiative heating (g–i) profiles classified
by mesoscale organization pattern using a characteristic example of each pattern as diagnosed from MODIS-Terra scenes from Worldview
(left column). This figure employs HALO dropsondes launched in the circular flight pattern (shown by the white circle) on the chosen day,
corresponding to roughly 70 dropsondes each. We focus on the spatial extent of the HALO flight pattern because the cloud organization
pattern does not necessarily extend across the entire sampling domain (Fig. 1a), nor have the patterns been shown to be scale invariant.

correspond to a subset of profiles with valid data starting original and perturbed radiative profiles (blue curves). In the
at 40 m (i.e., zmin ≤ 40 m) and during daytime, which cor- longwave and net, the effect of the perturbation is strong in
responds to 1314 profiles. The daytime filter was required the first atmospheric layer but then decreases rapidly and
for the relevant calculation of the error in the shortwave and becomes negligible after a few hundred meters. Except for
then kept for consistency for the longwave, but the magni- the first few atmospheric layers, the uncertainty around the
tude of errors in the longwave is not affected by this filter SSTskin can therefore be safely neglected.
(not shown). We then investigate the sensitivity to the uncertainty of
We first test the sensitivity to the ERA5 SSTskin . To this sounding measurements by perturbing all soundings by a ver-
end, we perturbed the original SSTskin by ± 0.42 K and re- tically uniform relative error and redoing all radiative trans-
calculated all heating rates. This value is chosen as it cor- fer calculations. The manufacturer predicts an uncertainty of
responds to the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between ± 0.1 K for the temperature and ± 3 % for specific humid-
ERA5 SSTskin and Marine-Atmospheric Emitted Radiance ity (Vaisala, 2018). The temperature uncertainty has virtu-
Interferometers (M-AERI) measures taken during a series ally no effect on radiative profiles (not shown). The effect of
of cruises in the Caribbean Sea from 2014 to 2019 (Luo ± 3 % uncertainty on the specific humidity profiles is shown
and Minnett, 2020). Figure 7 shows the RMSE between the in Fig. 7 in red. The highest RMSE for this specific humid-

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A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A 625

Figure 6. Thermodynamic and radiative heating profiles associated with an elevated moisture layer persisting for multiple hours on 24 Jan-
uary 2020 in the HALO flight pattern. Plotted here are the temperature (b), specific humidity (c), relative humidity (d), and shortwave,
longwave, and net radiative heating rate (f–h) profiles for two soundings sampled 3 h apart at 12:55 and 15:55 UTC. Alongside these profiles
are photographs (a, b) taken from the HALO aircraft during the flight and GOES-16 satellite images (i, j) with the dropsonde location and
launch time indicated by a circle along the circular flight pattern. Credit for the two flight photographs: Jessica Vial.

Figure 7. Root-mean-square error estimates in shortwave (a), longwave (b), and net heating rates (c) for perturbations in SSTskin (blue),
ERA5 humidity profiles (green), and sonde humidity measurements (red) for the 1314 daytime profiles that have valid data starting at
40 m. Dashed curves show negative perturbations, solid curves show positive perturbations, and dotted green curves show ERA5 humidity
perturbations restrained to the 1117 daytime profiles that have valid data at all levels between 40 m and 8 km. The horizontal gray bars on the
left panel show the frequency distribution in the maximum level measured (zmax ).

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626 A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A

ity perturbation occurs in the cloud layer between 800 m and produces localized errors in the cloud and inversion layers
2 km with a magnitude of 0.05 K/day for net radiative heat- below 3 km, though these errors are approximately 5 % or
ing. A secondary peak with a magnitude of 0.03 K/day is also less. We recommend that users carefully compare the mag-
evident near the inversion at about 3 km. Given a median ra- nitude of the signal they analyze with the magnitudes of the
diative heating value of −1 K/day throughout the lower tro- errors provided here.
posphere (Sect. 3.1), these errors are roughly 3 %–5 % for
the net radiative heating. These maxima likely correspond to
5 Code and data availability
the cumulative errors at the altitude of large vertical humid-
ity gradients which lead to peaks in longwave, and to a lesser
All data are archived and freely available for public access
extent shortwave, heating rates for individual profiles.
on AERIS https://doi.org/10.25326/78 (last access: 12 Febru-
Finally, we explore the uncertainty associated with ERA5
ary 2020, Albright et al., 2020a). The code used to compute
temperature and humidity data employed as an upper bound-
the radiative profiles and python scripts used to generate the
ary condition. In a similar way to the uncertainty analysis
figures of the present paper are publicly released on Zen-
for the sounding data, we perturb ERA5 3D fields – used as
odo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4010195, last access:
input for the radiative transfer code – by a uniform relative
18 February 2020, Albright et al., 2020b) and Github (https:
error. Previous studies have shown that ERA5 reanalyses can
//github.com/bfildier/Albright2020, last access: 18 Febru-
present biases of various kinds (Nagarajan and Aiyyer, 2004;
ary 2020, Albright et al., 2020c). MODIS-Terra scenes from
Dyroff et al., 2015). We compare ERA5 humidity and tem-
Worldview in Fig. 5 are accessed at: https://worldview.
perature data with coincident radiosonde measures to obtain
earthdata.nasa.gov (last access: 23 February 2021).
an estimate of ERA5 biases up to 100 hPa. From the surface
to 100 hPa, the RMSE in temperature between colocated ra-
diosonde soundings and ERA5 is between 0.3 and 0.7 K, with 6 Conclusions
a mean of 0.5 K, and between 5 % (at the surface) and 70 %
(near the inversion) for the specific humidity, with a mean The first objective of this work is to present the method used
around 30 %. to calculate clear-sky, aerosol-free radiative profiles from
Figure 7 only shows the effect of the ERA5 specific hu- 2580 radiosonde and dropsonde soundings launched during
midity uncertainty, taken at ± 30 %, on radiative profiles as the EUREC4 A field campaign. These radiative profiles are
the temperature once again has a negligible influence. The calculated using a state-of-the-art correlated-k model, RRT-
corresponding green curves (respectively dashed and solid) MGP, in which ERA5 reanalyses provide lower and upper
reveal local maxima in the longwave and net heating rates boundary conditions. We then aggregate the radiative heating
around 3, 7, and 9.5 km. Again given a median radiative profiles at multiple scales to examine temporal and spatial
heating value of -1K/day throughout the lower troposphere variability in trade wind regimes. We find that radiative heat-
(Sect. 3.1), the errors at these local peaks are between 10 % ing rates in the wintertime trade-wind environment display
and 30 %. These maxima coincide with the modes in the fre- significant diurnal and day-to-day variability, and we observe
quency distribution of the highest level, zmax , measured by hints that this variability may be associated with different
the soundings, indicated in gray in the left panel. These peaks types of mesoscale organization. An uncertainty assessment
suggest that the uncertainty arises from the large disconti- is further conducted to demonstrate that the influence of un-
nuities emerging at the ERA5-sounding junction level when certainties in the sounding data and upper and lower bound-
perturbing ERA5 humidity profiles. The results suggest that ary conditions is small relative to the magnitude of estimated
the corresponding uncertainty mainly occurs in the vicinity radiative heating.
of the junction levels. This notion is further confirmed by These results present a first overview of how this data set
calculating the RMSE only on profiles which have data be- could help answer existing research questions in particular.
tween 40 m and 8 km (i.e., zmin ≤ 40 m and zmax ≥ 8 km, dot- (1) What is the role played by radiation in the mesoscale
ted green curve); the remaining 1117 profiles do not contain organization of shallow convection (e.g., Seifert and Heus,
vertical discontinuities in humidity in this range, and we see 2013; Bretherton and Blossey, 2017) (2) what is the interplay
that the remaining upper-tropospheric discontinuities do not between the diurnal variability in radiative heating, convec-
affect heating rates in the lowest troposphere. tion, and cloudiness (e.g., Gray and Jacobson, 1977; Rup-
Overall, the small uncertainty values given with these tests pert and O’Neill, 2019; Vial et al., 2019), and (3) what is the
support the robustness of this data set and gives confidence influence of clear-sky radiative cooling gradients on atmo-
regarding its use for more detailed investigations in the lower spheric circulations (e.g., Gray and Jacobson, 1977; Mapes,
troposphere. The uncertainty from sea surface skin tempera- 2001; Emanuel et al., 2014; Thompson et al., 2017; Nau-
ture is limited to the first few atmosphere layers, and uncer- mann et al., 2019)? Such questions regarding the coupling
tainty from merging with ERA5 specific humidity is largely of clouds, convection, and circulations in trade-wind regimes
contained to the sounding-reanalysis junction point. Uncer- are at the heart of the EUREC4 A field campaign, and the ra-
tainty associated with observed specific humidity profiles diative profiles presented here complement other EUREC4 A

Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 617–630, 2021 https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-617-2021

A. L. Albright et al.: EUREC4 A 627

observations and data products in forming a toolbox for these https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4010195 (last access: 18 Febru-
investigations. ary 2020), 2020b.
Albright, A. L., Fildier, B., and Touzé-Peiffer, L.: Atmospheric ra-
diative profiles during EUREC4A, available at: https://github.
Author contributions. ALA, BF, and LTP contributed equally to com/bfildier/Albright2020 (last access: 18 February 2020),
the analysis, figures, and text. RP, CM, and JV helped in conceptu- 2020c.
alizing and guiding this project and contributed to the paper. Bony, S. and Dufresne, J.-L.: Marine boundary layer
clouds at the heart of tropical cloud feedback uncer-
tainties in climate models, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, 20,
https://doi.org/10.1029/2005GL023851, 2005.
Competing interests. The authors declare that they have no con-
Bony, S., Stevens, B., Ament, F., Bigorre, S., Chazette, P., Crewell,
flict of interest.
S., Delanoë, J., Emanuel, K., Farrell, D., Flamant, C., Gross,
S., Hirsh, L., Karstensen, J., Mayer, B., Nuijens, L., Ruppert,
J. H., Sandu, I., Siebesma, P., Speich, S., Szczap, F., Totems,
Special issue statement. This article is part of the special issue J., Vogel, R., Wendisch, M., and Wirth, M.: EUREC4A: A
“Elucidating the role of clouds–circulation coupling in climate: data Field Campaign to Elucidate the Couplings Between Clouds,
sets from the 2020 (EUREC4A) field campaign”. It is not associated Convection and Circulation, Surv. Geophys., 38, 1529–1568,
with a conference. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-017-9428-0, 2017.
Bony, S., Schulz, H., Vial, J., and Stevens, B.: Sugar, Gravel, Fish,
and Flowers: Dependence of Mesoscale Patterns of Trade-Wind
Acknowledgements. Anna Lea Albright is grateful for support Clouds on Environmental Conditions, Geophys. Res. Lett., 47,
from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European e2019GL085988, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085988, 2020.
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant Bretherton, C. S. and Blossey, P. N.: Understanding Mesoscale
agreement #694768). Benjamin Fildier and Caroline Muller grate- Aggregation of Shallow Cumulus Convection Using Large-
fully acknowledge funding from the European Research Coun- Eddy Simulation, J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst., 9, 2798–2821,
cil (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research https://doi.org/10.1002/2017MS000981, 2017.
and innovation programme (project CLUSTER, grant agreement Bretherton, C. S., Blossey, P. N., Khairoutdinov, M., Bretherton,
#805041). Ludovic Touzé-Peiffer gratefully acknowledges the C. S., Blossey, P. N., and Khairoutdinov, M.: An Energy-
funding of his PhD by the AMX program of the Ecole Polytech- Balance Analysis of Deep Convective Self-Aggregation
nique. Robert Pincus is grateful for support from the NOAA Cli- above Uniform SST, J. Atmos. Sci., 62, 4273–4292,
mate Program Office program Climate Variability and Predictabil- https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS3614.1, 2005.
ity. To access ERA5 reanalysis data, this study benefited from Cao, G., Giambelluca, T. W., Stevens, D. E., and Schroeder, T. A.:
the IPSL Prodiguer-Ciclad facility which is supported by CNRS, Inversion variability in the Hawaiian trade wind regime, J. Cli-
UPMC, and Labex L-IPSL and funded by the ANR (grant no. ANR- mate, 20, 1145–1160, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI4033.1, 2007.
10-LABX-0018) and by the European FP7 IS-ENES2 project (grant Chazette, P., Marnas, F., Totems, J., and Shang, X.: Comparison of
no. 312979). IASI water vapor retrieval with H2O-Raman lidar in the frame-
work of the Mediterranean HyMeX and ChArMEx programs, At-
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pean Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Dopplick, T. G.: Radiative heating of the global atmosphere,
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