Clear Sky Identification Using Data From Remote Sensing Systems at ARM's Southern Great Plains Site

Abstract

Clouds profoundly affect our weather and climate due, in large part, to their interactions with radiation. Unfortunately, our understanding of these interactions is, at best, incomplete, making it difficult to improve the treatment of atmospheric radiation in climate models. The improved treatment of clouds and radiation, and a better understanding of their interaction, in climate models is one of the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program's major goals. To learn more about the distribution of water and ice, i.e., clouds, within an atmospheric column, ARM has chosen to use the remote sensing of clouds, water vapor and aerosols at its three climatologically-diverse sites as its primary observational method. ARM's most heavily instrumented site, which has operated continuously for more than a decade, is its Southern Great Plains (SGP) Central Facility, located near Lamont, OK. Cloud-observing instruments at the Central Facility include the Whole Sky Imager, ceilometers, lidar, millimeter cloud radar, microwave radiometers and radiosondes.