To help new users of the offline ecRad radiation scheme become familiar with its capabilities, a set of practical exercises has been devised and added to ecRad version 1.3. Since 1.4.1 it includes a Jupyter notebook interface. It makes use of a slice through the atmosphere from the North Pole to the South Pole, taken from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset at 5 degrees east at 12 UTC on 11 July 2019. The slice includes Saharan dust, marine stratocumulus, deep convection and Arctic stratus. The main fields are shown here:
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In the control experiment, ecRad is run on these fields using the Tripleclouds solver (a noise-free but slightly slower alternative to the operational McICA solver). A number of Python-3 scripts (written by Shannon Mason) are provided to enable the user to visualize the output and to compare two or more ecRad runs with different settings. The fluxes and heating rates for the control run are shown below:
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We may also plot the change to the net fluxes (down minus up) at top-of-atmosphere and the surface; in this case this is the instantaneous radiative forcing associated with doubling carbon dioxide:
The practical instructions describe many other experiments that can be performed, for example:
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