Accounting for unresolved clouds in a 1‐D solar radiative‐transfer model

New methods for the treatment of solar radiative transfer through overlapping and inhomogeneous clouds are presented. First, a new approach to cloud overlap is shown. For the adjacent cloud blocks, the traditional maximum overlap can be relaxed to a mixture of maximum and random overlap treatments for layers that are adjacent but not fully correlated. Second, a new radiative‐transfer algorithm has been developed to deal with these various cloud overlap circumstances that is simple enough for implementation in a general‐circulation model (GCM). When compared to appropriate benchmark calculations, we find that this new method can produce accurate results in heating rates and fluxes with relative errors generally less than 8%. Third, a new and very simple approach to treating radiative transfer through a cloud with horizontal subgrid‐scale inhomogeneities is developed. This approach uses an optical‐depth scaling technique to represent the subgrid‐scale inhomogeneity. Finally, by combining all of the above elements, we provide a new algorithm for the combined treatment of cloud overlap and inhomogeneity and we show that it yields very reasonable accuracies for heating rates and fluxes. Through benchmark comparisons, we show that this new algorithm provides significant improvement over existing schemes in GCMs. Copyright © 2005 Royal Meteorological Society