Observations of Seasonal Variations in Atmospheric Greenhouse Trapping and Its Enhancement at High Sea Surface Temperature

Abstract

The correlation between observed values of atmospheric greenhouse trapping and sea surface temperature is found to vary seasonally. Atmospheric greenhouse trapping is defined here as the difference between infrared emissions from the earth's surface and infrared emissions from the top of the atmosphere through cloudless skies. Infrared surface emissions are calculated from known sea surface temperatures, and emissions from the top of the atmosphere are taken from direct satellite measurements. Atmospheric greenhouse trapping at the same sea surface temperature is greater in the winter than in the summer over temperate oceans. In subtropical latitudes, the opposite is true. At surface temperatures above approximately 298 K, atmospheric greenhouse trapping is found to increase even more rapidly from regions of lower sea surface temperature to regions of higher surface temperature than infrared surface emissions. The causes for this ?super? greenhouse effect are explored, and four processes are found to contribute. Water vapor continuum absorption and thermodynamically controlled increases in water vapor concentration at constant relative humility with increasing atmospheric temperature are found to make significant contributions, but do not explain the entire super greenhouse effect. To explain the observations of atmospheric greenhouse trapping, the atmosphere, and in particular the upper and middle troposphere, must be increasingly moist over the warmest sea surface temperatures, while the atmospheric temperature profile becomes increasingly unstable. Regions with these high sea surface temperatures are also increasingly subject to deep convection, which suggests that convection moistens the upper and middle troposphere in regions of convective activity relative to nonconvective regions, resulting in the super greenhouse effect. Dynamic processes, along with local thermodynamic process. are required to explain the observed super greenhouse effect.