Kotarba, A. Z. (2022) Impact of the revisit frequency on cloud climatology for CALIPSO, EarthCARE, Aeolus, and ICESat-2 satellite lidar missions

Space profiling lidars offer a unique insight into cloud properties in Earth’s atmosphere and are considered the most reliable source of total (column-integrated) cloud amount (CA), and true (geometrical) cloud top height (CTH). However, lidar-based cloud climatologies suffer from infrequent sampling: every n days, and only along the ground track. This study therefore evaluated four lidar missions, namely CALIPSO (revisit every n=16 d), EarthCARE (n=25), Aeolus (n=7), and ICESat-2 (n=91), to test the hypothesis that each mission provides accurate data on CA and CTH. CA/CTH values for a hypothetical daily revisit mission were used as reference (data simulated with Meteosat 15 min cloud observations, assumed to be a proxy for ground truth). Our results demonstrated that this hypothesis is invalid, unless individual lidar transects are averaged over an area in longitude and latitude (or larger). If this is not the case, the required accuracy of 1 % (for CA) or 150 m (for CTH) cannot be met, either for a single-year annual or monthly mean, or for a >10 year climatology. A CALIPSO-focused test demonstrated that the annual mean CA estimate is very sensitive to infrequent sampling, and that this factor alone can result in 14 % or 7 % average uncertainty with 1 or 2.5∘ resolution data, respectively. Consequently, applications that use gridded lidar data should consider calculating confidence intervals, or a similar measure of uncertainty. Our results suggest that CALIPSO, and its follow-on mission EarthCARE, are very likely to produce consistent cloud records despite the difference in sampling frequency.

Kotarba, A. Z. (2022) Impact of the revisit frequency on cloud climatology for CALIPSO, EarthCARE, Aeolus, and ICESat-2 satellite lidar missions
doi:10.5194/amt-15-4307-2022