SURFACE-BASED MEASUREMENTS AND SATELLITE RETRIEVALS OF BROKEN CLOUD PROPERTIES IN THE EQUATORIAL PACIFIC

Ship-based measurements of marine clouds and radiation in the equatori al Pacific are used to address a critical question: What is the relati onship of integrated cloud liquid to cloud albedo and solar flux at th e Earth's surface in the broken cloud regime? These measurements, take n during a 21-day on-site period of the Tropical Instability Wave Expe riment (TIWE), constitute the first comprehensive database for examini ng subgrid-scale parameterizations of cloud and radiation interactions for nonhomogeneous cloud regimes. The high-resolution field experimen t data are used in combination with satellite-based records to investi gate the relationship between small-scale (temporal and spatial) quant ities and the large-scale parameterizations of the effects. In the 21- day ship-based record the average cloud fraction was 0.26 and the aver age cloud optical depth was about 2. The temporally averaged ship-base d estimate of cloud liquid water for this period was 54 g m-2 , and th e temporally averaged satellite-based estimate of cloud liquid water w ithin 25 km of the ship was 50 g m-2.