Inhomogeneity effects of 1D and 2D bounded cascade model clouds on their effective radiative properties
Résumé
Inhomogeneous clouds generated with the bounded cascade process were used in a number of recent studies on the interaction between the radiative transfer process and inhomogeneous clouds. In this study, we investigate how the EHCA could be applied to 1D and 2D bounded cascade inhomogeneous absorbing clouds generated with different pairs of fractal parameters H and f. Firstly, we found that the empirical formulas we previously established were still applicable to other 1D and 2D inhomogeneous clouds with different single scattering albedo and with various types of fluctuations of the optical depth, except the case of very intermittent inhomogeneous clouds generated with H = 0 whatever f and H = 0.25 and f ≥ 0.3 (i.e. ϱτ > 1.5 ∼ 2, where ϱτ is a relative cloud inhomogeneity parameter defined as the standard deviation of the optical depth normalized by the mean optical depth). Secondly, we also found that the bias in the bidirectional reflectance factor between 1D and 2D inhomogeneous clouds radiance and their EHCA counterpart remained rather small (≤ 5%), again except the case of very intermittent inhomogeneous clouds with ϱτ > 1.5 ∼ 2, for which this bias reached 20% to 60%.