An Integrated Approach toward Retrieving Physically Consistent Profiles of Temperature, Humidity, and Cloud Liquid Water

Abstract

A method is presented for deriving physically consistent profiles of temperature, humidity, and cloud liquid water content. This approach combines a ground-based multichannel microwave radiometer, a cloud radar, a lidar-ceilometer, the nearest operational radiosonde measurement, and ground-level measurements of standard meteorological properties with statistics derived from results of a microphysical cloud model. All measurements are integrated within the framework of optimal estimation to guarantee a retrieved profile with maximum information content. The developed integrated profiling technique (IPT) is applied to synthetic cloud model output as a test of accuracy. It is shown that the liquid water content profiles obtained with the IPT are significantly more accurate than common methods that use the microwave-derived liquid water path to scale the radar reflectivity profile. The IPT is also applied to 2 months of the European Cloud Liquid Water Network (CLIWA-NET) Baltic Sea Experiment (BALTEX) BRIDGE main experiment (BBC) campaign data, considering liquid-phase, nonprecipitating clouds only. Error analysis indicates root-mean-square uncertainties of less than 1 K in temperature and less than 1 g m−3 in humidity, where the relative error in liquid water content ranges from 15% to 25%. A comparison of the vertically integrated humidity profile from the IPT with the nearest operational radiosonde shows an acceptable bias error of 0.13 kg m−2 when the Rosenkranz gas absorption model is used. However, if the Liebe gas absorption model is used, this systematic error increases to −1.24 kg m−2, showing that the IPT humidity retrieval is significantly dependent on the chosen gas absorption model.