ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP Atmos. Chem. Phys. 1680-7324 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-14-399-2014 The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder version 6 cloud products Kahn B. H. 1 Irion F. W. 1 Dang V. T. 1 Manning E. M. 1 Nasiri S. L. 2 Naud C. M. 3 Blaisdell J. M. 4 Schreier M. M. 1 5 Yue Q. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3559-6508 1 5 Bowman K. W. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8659-1117 1 Fetzer E. J. 1 Hulley G. C. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3266-179X 1 Liou K. N. 5 6 Lubin D. 7 Ou S. C. 5 6 Susskind J. 8 Takano Y. 5 6 Tian B. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9369-2373 1 Worden J. R. 1 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Science Applications International Corporation, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, University of California – Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California – Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California – San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA 10 01 2014 14 1 399 426 Copyright: © 2014 B. H. Kahn et al. 2014 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/14/399/2014/acp-14-399-2014.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/14/399/2014/acp-14-399-2014.pdf

The version 6 cloud products of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) instrument suite are described. The cloud top temperature, pressure, and height and effective cloud fraction are now reported at the AIRS field-of-view (FOV) resolution. Significant improvements in cloud height assignment over version 5 are shown with FOV-scale comparisons to cloud vertical structure observed by the CloudSat 94 GHz radar and the Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP). Cloud thermodynamic phase (ice, liquid, and unknown phase), ice cloud effective diameter (<i>D</i><sub>e</sub>), and ice cloud optical thickness (&tau;) are derived using an optimal estimation methodology for AIRS FOVs, and global distributions for 2007 are presented. The largest values of &tau; are found in the storm tracks and near convection in the tropics, while <i>D</i><sub>e</sub> is largest on the equatorial side of the midlatitude storm tracks in both hemispheres, and lowest in tropical thin cirrus and the winter polar atmosphere. Over the Maritime Continent the diurnal variability of &tau; is significantly larger than for the total cloud fraction, ice cloud frequency, and <i>D</i><sub>e</sub>, and is anchored to the island archipelago morphology. Important differences are described between northern and southern hemispheric midlatitude cyclones using storm center composites. The infrared-based cloud retrievals of AIRS provide unique, decadal-scale and global observations of clouds over portions of the diurnal and annual cycles, and capture variability within the mesoscale and synoptic scales at all latitudes.

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