Infrared (11 m) radiances from GOES-8 and local radiosonde profiles, collected during the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus LayersFlorida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL-FACE) in July 2002, are used to assess the vertical distribution of Florida-area deep convective cloud top height and test predictions as to its variation based on parcel theory. The highest infrared tops ( ) ...

In Herschel images of the Galactic plane and many star forming regions, a major factor limiting our ability to extract faint compact sources is cirrus confusion noise, operationally defined as the “statistical error to be expected in photometric measurements due to confusion in a background of fluctuating surface brightness”. The histogram of the flux densities of extracted sources shows a dist...

We explore ways in which high-spectral-resolution measurements can aid in the retrieval of atmospheric temperature and gas-concentration profiles from outgoing infrared spectra when optically thin cirrus clouds are present. Simulated outgoing spectra that contain cirrus are fitted with spectra that do not contain cirrus, and the residuals are examined. For those lines with weighting functions t...

This article addresses the need for new data on indirect effects of natural and anthropogenic aerosol particles on atmospheric ice clouds. Simultaneous measurements of the concentration and composition of tropospheric aerosol particles capable of initiating ice in cold (cirrus) clouds are reported. Measurements support that cirrus formation occurs both by heterogeneous nucleation by insoluble p...

PURPOSE Automatically generated measurements of the retinal volume or the central retinal thickness are based on correctly set threshold lines on the retinal surface and the retinal pigment epithelium. The purpose of this study was to compare the accuracy of threshold algorithm lines of Stratus optical coherence tomography (OCT) with those of Cirrus OCT. METHODS A consecutive series of patien...

An optical particle counter (OPC) is used in conjunction with lidar measurements to examine the characteristics of the particle size distribution in cirrus cloud in the tropical tropopause layer (TTL) over Thailand where the TTL is defined as the height at which temperature is lower than −75◦C in this paper. Of 11 OPC launches, cirrus cloud was detected at 10–15 km high on 7 occasions, cirrus w...

A new cirrus detection algorithm for the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infra-Red Imager (SEVIRI) aboard the geostationary Meteosat Second Generation (MSG), MeCiDA, is presented. The algorithm uses the seven infrared channels of SEVIRI and thus provides a consistent scheme for cirrus detection at day and night. MeCiDA combines morphological and multi-spectral threshold tests and detects opticall...

[1] In this paper we present radiative-convective simulations to test the idea that tropical cirrus clouds, acting as a negative feedback on climate, can provide a solution to the faint young Sun paradox. We find that global mean surface temperatures above freezing can indeed be found for luminosities larger than about 0.8 (corresponding to 2.9 Ga and nearly complete tropical cirrus coverage). ...