Reply on RC1

Abstract

A cloud identification and profiling algorithm is being developed for the Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI), which is one of the four instruments that the Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) spacecraft will feature. During recent work, we noticed that the MSI response function could shift substantially among some wavelengths (0.67 and 1.65 µm bands) owing to the smile effect, that is an effect in which a shift in the center wavelength appears as a distortion in the spectral image. We evaluated how the smile effect affects the cloud retrieval product qualitatively and quantitatively. We chose four detector pixels from bands 1 and 3 with the nadir pixel as the reference to elucidate how the smile effect error affects the cloud optical thickness (τ) and effective cloud droplet radius (re) by simulating the MSI forward radiation with Comprehensive Analysis Program for Cloud Optical Measurement (CAPCOM). We also evaluated the error in simulated scenes from a global cloud system resolving model and a satellite simulator to measure the effect on actual observation scenes. For typical shallow warm clouds (τ = 8, re = 8 μm), the smile effect on the cloud retrieval was not significant in most cases (up to 6 % error). For typical deep convective clouds (τ = 8, re = 40 μm), the smile effect on the cloud retrieval was even less significant in most cases (up to 4 % error). Moreover, our results from two oceanic scenes using the synthetic MSI data agreed well with the forward radiation simulation, indicating that the error from the smile effect was generally within 10 %.