AIRS, CloudSat, and CALIPSO clouds

Interactive comment on “Cloud type comparisons of AIRS, CloudSat, and CALIPSO cloud height and amount” by B. H. Kahn et al

The CALIPSO mission: Spaceborne lidar for observation of aerosols and clouds

Current uncertainties in the effects of aerosols and clouds on the Earth radiation budget limit our understanding of the climate system and the potential for global climate change. The CALIPSO satellite will use an active lidar together with passive instruments to provide vertical profiles of aerosols and clouds and their properties which will help address these uncertainties. CALIPSO will fly ...

Hydrometeor Detection Using Cloudsat—An Earth-Orbiting 94-GHz Cloud Radar

In late April 2006, NASA launched Cloudsat, an earth-observing satellite that uses a near-nadir-pointing millimeter-wavelength radar to probe the vertical structure of clouds and precipitation. The first step in using Cloudsat measurements is to distinguish clouds and other hydrometeors from radar noise. In this article the operational Cloudsat hydrometeor detection algorithm is described, diff...

Evaluation of tropical cloud and precipitation statistics of Community Atmosphere Model version 3 using CloudSat and CALIPSO data

[1] The combined CloudSat and CALIPSO satellite observations provide the first simultaneous measurements of cloud and precipitation vertical structure and are used to examine the representation of tropical clouds and precipitation in the Community Atmosphere Model version 3 (CAM3). A simulator package utilizing a model‐to‐satellite approach facilitates comparison of model simulations to observa...

Ocean and Polarization observations from active remote sensing: Atmospheric and Ocean science applications

In the past few years, we have demonstrated how the surface return measured by the active instruments onboard CloudSat and CALIPSO could be used to retrieve the optical depth and backscatter phase function (lidar ratio) of aerosols and ice clouds. This methodology lead to the development of a data fusion product publicly available at the ICARE archive center using the Synergized Optical Depth o...

Improvement of Aerosol Retrieval through Cloud Identification

The stable aerosol retrieval algorithm needs a prior assumption of lidar ratio (the extinction-to-backscatter ratio), and the known aerosol type that is the prerequisite of the assumption, so how to identify the clouds from lidar profile is fundamental to acquire atmospheric optical parameter. CALIPSO is a space-borne lidar and it can observe the aerosol characteristic, but can not penetrate th...