Combined lidar and radar cloud particle effective size retrievals made during CLARA

In principle, combined lidar and radar cloud soundings are capable of provi ding detailed height resolved information of the effective sizes of cloud p articles. However, one of the obstacles to successfully using lidar and rad ar measurements to this end is the fact that it is difficult to account for the effects of attenuation, particularly with respect to the lidar signal. In this paper, a novel method for simultaneously determining cloud particl e effective size profiles together with the lidar attenuation profile is pr esented. Simulations and the application to red data shows that this proced ure appears to be quite robust even in cases where significant lidar attenu ation is present. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.