Lidar studies on climate sensitivity characteristics of tropical cirrus clouds

Abstract

The cirrus clouds play an important role in the Earth’s radiation budget due to their high frequency of occurrence, non-spherical ice crystal formations, and variability in the scattering/absorption characteristics. Mostly, the tropical cirrus clouds are considered as greenhouse modulators. Thus the parameterization of tropical cirrus clouds in terms of the micro- physical properties and the corresponding radiative effects are highly important for the climate studies. For characterizing the radiative properties of cirrus clouds, which depend on the size, shape and number of the ice crystals, the knowledge of extinction coefficient (σ) and optical depth (τ) are necessary. The σ provides information needed for understanding the influence of the scatterers on the radiative budget whereas the τ gives an indication on the composition and thickness of the cloud. Extensive research on the tropical cirrus clouds has been carried out by using a ground based and satellite based lidar systems. In this work, the characteristics of tropical cirrus cloud derived by using the data from the ground based lidar system over the tropical site Gadanki [13.5°N, 79.2°E], India during 2010 are presented. Some of the results are compared with those obtained by us from satellite based CALIOP lidar observations of the CALIPSO mission. It is observed that there is a strong dependence of the some of the physical properties such as occurrence height, cloud temperature and the geometrical thickness on the microphysical parameters in terms of extinction coefficient and optical depth. The correlation of both the σ and τ with temperature is also observed.