The greenhouse effect is defined here as the fraction of infrared radiation emitted by the Earth that is retained by the greenhouse effect and fails to escape to space. represents the fraction of infra-red energy emitted by the Earth that escapes to space.
We note the reference greenhouse effect, chosen at the pre-industrial time.
We assume that variations in the greenhouse effect are related to changes in the atmospheric concentration in water vapor and in . We neglect the effect of changes in the concentration of other greenhouse gases such as or , or we consider them in terms of ``-equivalent''.
We have:
where is the greenhouse effect anomaly with respect to the reference related to the water vapor concentration anomaly and is that related to the concentration anomaly.
is calculated as a function of concentration: . In the usual CO2 concentration range (between 100 and 10,000 ppm), we assume a logarithmic relationship between and ([Myhre et al., 1998,Pierrehumbert et al., 2006]):
The factor is adjusted to obtain realistic climate projections, and is currently set at 2.2. Around this range, a linear approximation extends the logarithmic relationship.
The effect of the concentration on he infra-red energy emitted by the Earth escaping to the space () is illustrated in figure 9.
is calculated as a function of the global-mean amount of water vapor integrated in the atmospheric column, :
where is the ratio between the amount of water vapor at time and its reference quantity:
and limits the greenhouse effect when becomes very strong, avoiding too strong a runaway greenhouse effect when the temperature becomes very strong: : .
To satisfy the observational constraints (section 2.1), we take and .
In order to simulate the positive feedback of water vapor on the climate, the ratio is expressed as a function of the temperature assuming that the relative humidity remains constant. Then equals the ratio of partial saturation pressures .
The saturation vapor pressure is calculated by the Rankine formula:
The temperature is in K and .