Short-term Prediction Research
and Transition Center

Remote Sensing Techniques

CloudSat Product Development

Clouds play a significant role in the Earth-atmosphere system through their effects on the energy budget and precipitation processes. Accurate methods for estimating cloud top altitudes are required to diagnose atmospheric processes and to improve satellite data assimilation techniques, and improved techniques will lead to increased forecast accuracy. Several cloud top estimates (link to page/section on cloud top retrievals) are provided by instruments such as the GOES Imager and GOES Sounder (http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/goesprod/), MODIS, and AIRS. CloudSat provides a unique opportunity for validation by providing radar profiles of cloud reflectivity that may be used to verify cloud altitudes. (insert cross section figure here).

CloudSat cloud profiling radar reflectivities and cloud top pressure estimates through a tropical cyclone south of Florida in late August 2006.  The CloudSat vertical pressure coordinate is provided by coincident ECMWF model output with cloud top pressure estimates from AIRS (red), the GOES Imager (green), the GOES Sounder (yellow) and Aqua MODIS (pink) as overlays.

CloudSat also provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the microphysical structure of clouds by revealing the distribution of cloud particle sizes through radar reflectivity. Just as operational radars are used on the surface to infer precipitation particle sizes and rain rates, CloudSat may provide similar details for the full depth of a cloud structure. CloudSat observations of actual clouds may be compared to cloud representations in high resolution numerical models to determine if the modeled cloud resembles actual observations.