Toward Cloud Tomography from Space Using MISR and MODIS: Locating the “Veiled Core” in Opaque Convective Clouds

Abstract

For passive satellite imagers, current retrievals of cloud optical thickness and effective particle size fail for convective clouds with 3D morphology. Indeed, being based on 1D radiative transfer (RT) theory, they work well only for horizontally homogeneous clouds. A promising approach for treating clouds as fully 3D objects is cloud tomography, and this has been demonstrated for airborne observations. For cloud tomography from space, however, more efficient forward 3D RT solvers are required. Here, we present a path forward, acknowledging that optically thick clouds have "veiled cores." Photons scattered into and out of this deep region do not contribute significant information to the observed imagery about the inner structure of the cloud. We investigate the location of the veiled core for the MISR and MODIS imagers. While MISR provides multi-angle imagery in the visible and near-IR, MODIS includes channels in the short-wave IR, albeit at a single view angle. This combination will enable future 3D retrievals to disentangle the cloud's effective particle size and optical thickness. We find that, in practice, the veiled core is located at an optical distance of $\approx$5 starting from the cloud boundary along the line-of-sight. For MODIS' absorbing wavelengths the veiled core covers a larger volume, starting at smaller optical distances. This result makes it possible to reduce the number of unknowns for the cloud tomographic reconstruction, and opens up new ways to increase the efficiency of the 3D RT solver at the heart of the reconstruction algorithm.