A new classification of satellite-derived liquid water cloud regimes at cloud scale

Unglaub, Claudia; Block, Karoline; Mülmenstädt, Johannes; Sourdeval, Odran; Quaas, Johannes

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-2407-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-2407-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-2407-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 4

Research article

|

28 Feb 2020

Research article |

| 28 Feb 2020

A new classification of satellite-derived liquid water cloud regimes at cloud scale

Claudia Unglaub, Karoline Block, Johannes Mülmenstädt, Odran Sourdeval, and Johannes Quaas

Data sets

Relationships among cloud occurrence frequency, overlap, and effective thickness derived from CALIPSO and CloudSat merged cloud vertical profiles S. Kato, S. Sun-Mack, W. F. Miller, F. G. Rose, Y. Chen, P. Minnis, and B. A. Wielicki https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD012277

Improvements of top-of-atmosphere and surface irradiance computations with CALIPSO-, CloudSat-, and MODIS-derived cloud and aerosol properties S. Kato, F. G. Rose, S. Sun-Mack, W. F. Miller, Y. Chen, D. A. Rutan, G. L. Stephens, N. G. Loeb, P. Minnis, B. A. Wielicki, D. M. Winker, T. P. Charlock, W. Stackhouse Jr., K.-M. Xu, and W. D. Collins https://doi.org/10.1029/2011JD016050

Short summary

In cloud research, it is necessary to classify clouds. The World Meteorological Organization proposes distinguishing stratiform and cumuliform clouds in three altitude layers. The paper explains why previous approaches to classify clouds fail for many applications and proposes a new classification on the basis of new approaches for satellite retrievals to derive cloud-base height, in combination with cloud inhomogeneity. It is demonstrated that this discriminates cloud characteristics well.