Underestimation of oceanic warm cloud occurrences by the Cloud Profiling Radar aboard CloudSat

Abstract

The Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) onboard CloudSat is an active sensor specifically dedicated to cloud detection. Compared to passive remote sensors, CPR plays a unique role in investigating the occurrence of multi-layer clouds and depicting the internal vertical structure of clouds. However, owing to contamination from ground clutter, CPR reflectivity signals are invalid in the lowest 1 km above the surface, leading to numerous missed detections of warm clouds. In this study, by using 1-yr CPR and MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) synchronous data, those CPR-missed oceanic warm clouds that are identified as cloudy by MODIS are examined. It is demonstrated that CPR severely underestimates the occurrence of oceanic warm clouds, with a global-average miss rate of about 0.43. Over the tropical and subtropical oceans, the CPR-missed clouds tend to occur in regions with relatively low sea surface temperature. CPR misses almost all warm clouds with cloud tops lower than 1 km, and the miss rate reduces with increasing cloud top. As for clouds with cloud tops higher than 2 km, the negative bias of CPR-captured warm cloud occurrence falls below 3%. The cloud top height of CPR-missed warm clouds ranges from 0.6 to 1.2 km, and these clouds mostly have evidently small optical depths and droplet effective radii. The vertically integrated cloud liquid water content of CPR-missed warm clouds is smaller than 50 g m−2. It is also revealed that CPR misses some warm clouds that have small optical depths or small droplet sizes, besides those limited in the boundary layer below about 1 km due to ground clutter.