Investigating The Life Cycle and Radiation of Deep Convective Clouds using Airborne and Satellite Remote Sensing

Abstract:

Deep Convective Clouds (DCCs) have key role in the tropical region. Despite they only have small spatial coverage, but they account most of the total precipitation in these region which often make flooding. There are such of aviation accidents caused by strong vertical wind, hailing, icing and lightning inside the clouds. Pollutions caused by biomass burning and land degradation can change the aerosol properties as well as cloud properties, therefore will influence the radiation and formation of the DCCs. Those are the major reasons that better understanding of DCCs formation and life cycle are necessary.

Between Sept. 01 – Oct. 14, ACRIDICON (Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation, and Radiation Interactions and Dynamics of Concevtive Clouds Systems) campaign was conducted over Amazonia. It is suitable area to be the site-study due to has strong contrast environtment (pristine and polluted), regular convection activities and stable meteorological condition. In this study we focus on the 2 satellite validation missions designed to fly collocated but in different altitude with A-TRAIN constellation. In order to study DCCs-solar radiation interaction, we use SMART (Spectral Modular Airborne Radiation Measurements System) installed on HALO (High Altitude and Long-Range Research Aircraft) which measures spectral Irradiance (F) and Radiance (I) at the wavelength between 300–2200 nm corresponding to satellite. Due to the limitation in spatial and temporal, airborne measurements only give snapshots of atmosphere condition and DCCs formation, therefore we use multi-satellite data as DCCs have high vertical and horizontal distance, long temporal development and complex form.

The comparison of AQUA MODIS and SMART Radiance at 645 nm (non-absorbing) in the clear-sky condition gives strong agreement, but in the multilayer-cloud condition gives worse and results in high underestimation (-86%) in SMART data especially at lower altitude. The bias is caused by interference from clouds above flight which can be observed by CLOUDSAT. High surface reflectivity (over land) and 3D effect become the challenges since they have strong influence for the radiation measurement in this case. Finally, using GOES-13 at visible wavelength in 30 minutes temporal resolution obviously can depict DCCs evolution and phase transition.