Combined radar and lidar cloud remote sensing: Comparison with IR radiometer and in-situ measurements

A new combined radar and lidar inversion procedure has been developed for c loud particle effective radius and water content retrievals. The algorithm uses the radar reflectivity and an effective particle size to parameterize the extinction at the lidar wavelength while treating the derived sizes and lidar multiple scattering effects in a consistent fashion. This procedure has been applied to data from the CLouds And RAdiation experiment (CLARA) a nd the Cloud Lidar and Radar Experiment (CLARE'98) campaigns. The results c ompare well with simultaneous IR-radiometer cloud measurements as well as m easurements made in ice-clouds using aircraft mounted 2D probe particle-siz ing instruments. In addition, the reflectivities calculated from the in-sit u measurements alone are seen to consistent with the observed reflectivitie s. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.