Vol 52, No 5 (2016)

A short survey prepared by the Russian Commission on Atmospheric Radiation contains the most significant results of work in the field of atmospheric-radiation studies performed in 2011–2014. It is part of the Russian National Report on Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences prepared for the International Association on Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS)¹. During this period, the Russian Commission on Atmospheric Radiation, jointly with the concerned departments and organizations, organized two International Symposiums on Radiation and Dynamics (ISARD-2011 and ISARD-2013). At these conferences, the central problems in modern atmospheric physics were discussed: radiative transfer (RT) and atmospheric optics; greenhouse gases, clouds, and aerosols; remote methods of measurements; and new measurement data. This survey presents six directions covering the whole spectrum of investigations performed in the field of atmospheric radiation.

The results of Russian investigations into the Earth’s middle atmosphere that were published in the period of 2011–2014 are presented. The survey is prepared as part of the National Report on Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences for the XXVI General Assembly of the International Union on Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) that was held from June 22 to July 2, 2015, in Prague, Czech Republic.

Due to a lack of observational data, the hydrological fields of temperature, salinity, and density used by oceanographers at present remain significantly smoothed. Specifically, this refers to the WOA data distributed freely by the group of Sidney Levitus. This study describes the history of synthesis of hydrological data and mathematical modeling with high resolution. Our aim is to minimize the drawbacks of original data of hydrological fields, improve them with the help of a mathematical model, and thus reproduce the current fields. The results of some realistic calculations are presented.

The automatic system of operational forecasting of the Black Sea state which functions at the Marine Hydrophysical Institute is presented. Principles of the system construction are considered; the marine environment models used for forecasting, the data streams required for the system functioning, and tools for validating and visualizing the results of sea-state calculations are described. Some examples of investigating a number of processes and phenomena in the Black Sea are given.

A numerical experiment has been carried out using a hydrodynamical model with nonlinear equations of motion and heat and salt advection to reconstruct the fields of hydrophysical parameters taking into account the real atmospheric forcing for the autumn season along the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula. The studied part of the coast is situated at 44.25°N 33.95°E/44.72°N 34.55°E. High spatial resolution is used for modeling: 350 m in the horizontal plane with 38 layers in the vertical; the bottom topography is described in detail with ~500 m resolution. Detected and studied meso- and sub-mesoscale structures in the current field agree well with the observational data, which is impossible or hard to identify in numerical experiments with coarser resolution. Their kinematic characteristics and the lifetime are defined and some mechanisms of their origin are suggested.