The people who really care about this stuff are climatologists (and climate modelers), and increasingly the solar power community. The issue as far as the soaring community is concerned is that most of the sunlight that is lost to absorption in the atmosphere is mostly-always lost

* UV is absorbed in the stratosphere; as far as total energy is concerned there is not much variability in what gets to the ground.

* Chappuis-band O3 absorption (in the visible red) can change the surface heat flux a few percent, no more

* the big H2O band at 940 nm is very important climatologically .. but is perhaps 5% of total energy flux and not as variable as people might think

* H2O and CO2 (and some others) at wavelengths 1.4 microns lead to substantial extinctions in the 1.4 - 3 micron wavelength domains -- but our human eyes don't see that, the sun's solar output is decreasing at longer wavelengths, nor do silicon solar cells get energy from these wavelengths.

When you look at energy balance commonly more than 20% of the sun's radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere, and this is very important to the thermal structure of the atmosphere, but it isn't highly variable (as a fraction of total energy) so people just don't pay too much attention to it, for purposes like soaring.

This energy ends up as heat, distributed non-uniformly through the atmospheric column. The most blatantly obvious effect is that we have a stratosphere; there are also climatically-important consequences to this in the troposphere. Most of this heat is deposited at altitudes where we don't fly.

The dominant issues that effect lower-boundary layer heating rates are pretty obvious: clouds! Yes, surface-albedo ... and then a very large factor not discussed here is what meteorologists call the "Bowen ratio:" the ratio of the latent-to-sensible heat flux from the surface ... how much of the heat is used to evaporate water.

Deserts are good for soaring because most of the captured radiation does go to sensible heat.

A "secret" most western pilots don't know -- the best soaring season in the northeast is spring, before the trees leaf out. It's our desert. After they leaf out ... then every damned tree is a water-sucking nuisance ... and a subtle point is that deciduous trees flux more water than conifers ... there are easily-observable differences in Bowen-ratio from deciduous vs conifer forests.

More subtly there is a second "good" period in the fall when the trees lose their leaves, although with the declining sunlight it's not really great. But since the time of Benjamin Franklin naturalists noted that stream flows in the northeast jump after the trees lose their leaves in the fall, and correctly attributed the reason for this.

One of several reasons "the high ground" is usually better soaring (everywhere) is that water runs off it; the trees are almost always water-stress limited and shifted to species (conifers) that do that better. A water-stressed tree keeps its stomata closed: doesn't flux water but also cannot photosynthesize.

Plants do change the surface albedo, usually lower it. Plants look green because they don't use green light, and they want to reflect it to avoid its heat. They also increase the albedo at longer wavelengths. But this effect on albedo is usually less important that their water flux ... if they aren't water stressed.

Soil moisture can be measured (sort-of) by remote sensing in the microwave, and there are very large variations in soil moisture temporally (ask any farmer), but also spatially across the terrain ... in places (not our western deserts) where there's enough water for plants to grow generously.

Hey Eric Greenwell? You still flying around Richland Washington? I flew with you, and towed you years ago when I worked at PNL. It's pretty arid out there ... but nobody finds good thermals coming up off the big irrigated crop circles. In desert terrains stay away from green like the plague.

In the northeast the hierarchy is plowed-fields better than conifers, conifers better than growing hay or corn UNLESS the farmers are complaining about a dry spell, say out of the river bottoms and anywhere with deciduous trees, worse yet willows.