Assessing global microphysics of warm cloud and light precipitation from active sensors

Abstract:

Synergetic uses of radar and lidar are potentially useful for deriving vertically resolved microphysical properties of aerosols, clouds and precipitation. The Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) mission, carrying Doppler Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) and a high spectral resolution lidar (ATLID) is expected to bring qualitative estimate of these quantities together with cloud vertical velocity information. The standard algorithm for warm cloud microphysics developed under the first Jaxa EarthCARE Research announcement enables us to tackle bimodal problems on retrieving size and number concentration of cloud particles and drizzles coexisting within a vertical grid, by practically incorporating backward Monte-Carlo calculations of the polarized lidar returns in the inversion scheme with sufficient processing speed adapted to global data. In the present study, the developed algorithm has been applied to similar set of measurements from A-train, especially from CloudSat and CALIPSO, to derive global views of cloud and drizzle vertical distributions to be further used to examine the performance of their parameterizations in climate and cloud resolving models.