Relationship between Ice Cloud Microphysics and Supersaturation from Spaceborne Cloud Radar, Lidar and Infrared Sounder

Abstract:

We examined the relationship between ice cloud microphysics retrieved from cloud radar on CloudSat and CALIOP on CALIPSO and super saturation inferred from AIRS on AQUA. Ice microphysics such as ice water content (IWC) and effective radius was estimated by CloudSat and CALIPSO data. Unique features of the algorithm is that it has been designed to use depolarization ratio from CALIOP addition to radar reflectivity factor from CloudSat and attenuated backscattering coefficient from CALIOP in order to take into account the variation of ice particle shapes and their orientations [Okamoto et al., 2010]. Water vapor density and temperature were retrieved with much finer resolution by the application of Ishimoto’s algorithm [2009] compared with standard AIRS products where horizontal resolution is 45km. The algorithm allows retrievals of water vapor density and temperature every 13.5km in horizontal direction with 1km in vertical. The retrievals are carried out when there is no cloud with its cloud top pressure <200hPa. That is, it is possible to report water vapor information above low-level clouds. Then we sampled the amount of water vapor and temperature estimated from AIRS data to match the CloudSat and CALIPSO foot-print and the data were interpolated to have the same space and time resolution of the merged data sets of CloudSat and CALIPSO, i.e., 1.1km and 240m for horizontal and vertical resolutions. In the new AIRS products, ice super saturation often reached 150% while standard AIRS products showed less frequent super saturation. The ECMWF results generally showed smaller fraction of ice super saturation compared with the new AIRS products. In order to quantitatively compare the water vapor amount and retrieved IWC, we estimated the excess of water amount respect to ice saturation by using ice super saturation. The occurrences of ice clouds inferred from CloudSat and CALIOP agreed with the occurrences of ice-supersaturation reported in the new AIRS products. The retrieved IWC were smaller compared with the estimated IWC from the new AIRS products. Similar analyses with ECMWF showed smaller estimated IWC compared with the values in the new products.