PNNL

Abstract

Observations of clouds from the ground-based U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program (ARM) and satellite-based A-train are used to compute cloud radiative forcing profiles over the ARM Darwin, Australia site. Cloud properties are obtained from both radar (the ARM Millimeter Cloud Radar (MMCR) and the CloudSat satellite in the A-train) and lidar (the ARM Micropulse lidar (MPL) and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite in the A-train) observations. Cloud microphysical properties are taken from combined radar and lidar retrievals for ice clouds and radar only or lidar only retrievals for liquid clouds. Large, statistically significant differences of up to 1.43 K/day exist between the mean ARM and A-train net cloud radiative forcing profiles. The majority of the difference in cloud radiative forcing profiles is shown to be due to a large difference in the cloud fraction above 12 km. Above this altitude the A-train cloud fraction is significantly larger because more clouds are detected by CALIPSO than by the ground-based MPL. It is shown that the MPL is unable to observe as many high clouds as CALIPSO due to being more frequently attenuated and a poorer sensitivity even in otherwise clear-sky conditions. After accounting for cloud fraction differences and instrument sampling differences due to viewing platform we determined that differences in cloud radiative forcing due to the retrieved ice cloud properties is relatively small. This study demonstrates that A-train observations are better suited for the calculation cloud radiative forcing profiles. In addition, we find that it is necessary to supplement CloudSat with CALIPSO observations to obtain accurate cloud radiative forcing profiles since a large portion of clouds at Darwin are detected by CALIPSO only.