Radiative and evaporative cooling in the entrainment zone of stratocumulus - The role of longwave radiative cooling above cloud top

A mixing fraction determines the relative amount of above-cloud-top air that has been mixed into a cloudy air parcel. A method, based on the use of mixing fractions, to calculate the cooling effects due to mixing, longwave radiation and phase changes at cloud top is derived and discussed. We compute cooling effects for the whole range of mixing fraction for two observed cases of the stratocumulus-topped marine boundary layer. In both cases the total radiative cooling effect is found to be the most dominant contributor to the negative buoyancy excess found at cloud top. The largest radiative cooling rates are found for clear-air parcels immediately adjacent to cloud top rather than inside the cloud. With the help of a simple longwave radiation model, we show this to be caused by clear-air radiative cooling due to the temperature inversion at cloud top. Further we show that flux profiles in the entrainment zone can be computed from data obtained from a horizontal level run that is half the time in cloud and half the time out of cloud.