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Abstract
Abstract. Satellite observations of radiation in the microwave and sub-millimetre spectral regions (broadly from 1 to 1000 GHz) can have strong sensitivity to cloud and precipitation particles in the atmosphere. These particles (known as hydrometeors) scatter, absorb, and emit radiation according to their mass, composition, shape, internal structure, and orientation. Hence, microwave and sub-millimetre observations have applications including weather forecasting, geophysical retrievals and model validation. To simulate these observations requires a scattering-capable radiative transfer model and an estimate of the bulk optical properties of the hydrometeors. This article describes the module used to integrate single-particle optical properties over a particle size distribution (PSD) to provide bulk optical properties for the Radiative Transfer for TOVS microwave and sub-millimetre scattering code, RTTOV-SCATT, a widely used fast model. Bulk optical properties can be derived from a range of particle models including Mie spheres (liquid and frozen) and non-spherical ice habits from the Liu and Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Simulator (ARTS) databases, which include pristine crystals, aggregates, and hail. The effects of different PSD and particle options on simulated brightness temperatures are explored, based on an analytical two-stream solution for a homogeneous cloud slab. The hydrometeor scattering “spectrum” below 1000 GHz is described, along with its sensitivities to particle composition (liquid or ice), size and shape. The optical behaviour of frozen particles changes in the frequencies above 200 GHz, moving towards an optically thick and emission-dominated regime more familiar from the infrared. This region is little explored but will soon be covered by the Ice Cloud Imager (ICI).
Highlights
Observations of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave and sub-millimetre spectral regions1 can have strong sensitivity to hydrometeors, i.e. cloud and precipitation particles in the atmosphere
This work has summarised the process of generating bulk hydrometeor optical properties based on physical assumptions about the sizes, masses, habits, and orientations of cloud and precipitation particles
The work has overviewed the bulk optical properties and brightness temperatures generated by Mie spheres and two databases of non-spherical ice particles (Liu, 2008; Eriksson et al, 2018)
Summary
Observations of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave and sub-millimetre spectral regions can have strong sensitivity to hydrometeors, i.e. cloud and precipitation particles in the atmosphere. The primary sensitivity is to the mass and composition of the particles, but there is information on a range of microphysical characteristics. These observations are used for improving our understanding of cloud physics, for cloud and precipitation retrievals (Skofronick-Jackson et al, 2018), for model evaluation (Ori et al, 2020), and for all-sky data assimilation in operational weather forecasting (Geer et al, 2017, 2018). The forward model should represent the emission and scattering of microwave and sub-millimetre radiation from hydrometeors according to their mass, composition (potentially including water, ice, and air), shape, internal structure, and Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. Geer et al.: Hydrometeor optical properties for RTTOV-SCATT v13.0 orientation (e.g. Eriksson et al, 2015; Schrom and Kumjian, 2018; Ekelund et al, 2020a)
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