Atmospheric radiative profiles during EUREC4A

The couplings among clouds, convection, and circulation in trade-wind regimes remain a fundamental puzzle that limits our ability to constrain future climate change. Radiative heating plays an important role in these couplings. Here we calculate the clear-sky radiative profiles from 2001 in-situ soundings (978 dropsondes and 1023 radiosondes) collected during the EUREC4A field campaign, which took place south and east of Barbados in January–February 2020. We describe the method used to calculate these radiative profiles and present preliminary results sampling variability at multiple scales, from the variability across all soundings to groupings by diurnal cycle and mesoscale organization state, as well as individual soundings associated with elevated moisture layers. This clear-sky radiative profiles data set can provide important missing detail to what can be learned from calculations based on passive remote sensing and help in investigating the role of radiation in dynamic and thermodynamic variability in trade-wind regimes. All data are archived and freely available for public access on AERIS (Albright et al. (2020), https://doi.org/10.25326/78).