Past exam of the physics of atmospheres and oceans course of the University of Oxford / 2017 / 1 / d / Solution

Take a weak line in the radiative sense: the integrated slant optical depth is small wherever absorption materially contributes, not merely a small greenhouse-gas mass mixing ratio. Normalize every local spectral line profile so that $\int {\kappa }_{\nu }(p)d\nu =S$, with the line strength independent of pressure and, as stipulated, temperature. Keep a finite Doppler or natural core, or a Voigt profile, so that a pressure-only zero-width core at the top does not invalidate a uniform optical-depth expansion. The line must also be narrow enough to use $B_{{\nu }_0}$ across it.

To first order,Thus the detailed normalized line shape drops out, even if its width varies with pressure. Substituting in the deficit in c givesThe neglected term is second order when the relevant squared optical depths are integrable and uniformly small. A very narrow saturated line need not be weak simply because $q\ll 1$. More generally the displayed first-order integrated limit follows from the finite integrated opacity even if an idealized line centre makes a pointwise expansion nonuniform; a finite physical core is the straightforward sufficient assumption.

For an explicitly perturbative temperature estimate, evaluate the bracket at $T_{\mathrm{bare}}$:At fixed $p_s,g,q,S$ and radiative conditions, increasing $\kappa =R_b/c_{p,b}$ makes every level $0<r<1$ cooler relative to the surface, enlarging the bracket and the warming. Increasing $c_{p,b}$ at fixed $R_b$ has the opposite effect. The limit $\kappa \to 0$ is isothermal and gives zero line-induced deficit. A change of background molecular mass alone need not change this leading result: for ideal gases with the same active degrees of freedom, $R_b$ and $c_{p,b}$ scale together and their ratio is unchanged. Comparing only the height-coordinate lapse rate $g/c_{p,b}$ would miss that the absorber column is naturally a pressure-coordinate quantity.