New Ceres Data Examined for Evidence of Tropical Iris Feedback

New data products from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES; Wielicki et al., 1996) instrument were recently released. The Single Scanner Footprint (SSF) data product combines radiation budget data from CERES with cloud property retrievals from an imager on the same platform to provide a vastly improved characterization of the state of the atmosphere. In addition, the SSF incorporates new CERES angular distribution models (ADM; Loeb et al., 2002) based on improved scene identification to obtain more accurate top-of-atmosphere fluxes from the satellite-measured radiances. Together these advances allow the study of radiative fluxes for specific cloud types with unprecedented accuracy. SSF data products are now available using the Visible and InfraRed Sensor (VIRS) for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). These data are used here to explore the Iris hypothesis recently proposed by Lindzen et al., 2001 (hereafter LCH).