INFRARED COOLING RATE CALCULATIONS IN OPERATIONAL GENERAL-CIRCULATION MODELS - COMPARISONS WITH BENCHMARK COMPUTATIONS

As part of the Intercomparison of Radiation Codes in Climate Models (ICRCCM) project, careful comparisons of the performance of a large number of radiation codes were carried out, and the results compared with those of benchmark calculations. In this paper, we document the performance of a number of parameterized models which have been heavily used in climate and numerical prediction research at three institutions: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).