Microwave and infrared remote sensing of ice clouds : measurements and radiative transfer simulations

Abstract: This licentiate thesis considers the combination of multiple instruments for remote sensing of the Earth atmosphere from space. The primary focus is on remote sensing of atmospheric ice. Ice clouds are important for the Earth’s radiation budget, but their properties are difficult to measure and therefore poorly known. A better quantification of ice clouds is needed to improve global climate models. This thesis introduces the reader to the subject and describes how to combine measurements and radiative transfer simulations in an attempt to improve our understanding. A major part of this work is the development of a toolkit to find co-incident measurements, or collocations, between any pair of down-looking satellite sensors. Firstly, this toolkit is used to collocate passive microwave and thermal infrared sensors on meteorological satellites with the Cloud Profiling Radar on CloudSat. With the resulting collocated dataset, the Ice Water Path (IWP) signal in passive thermal radiation is studied and an improved IWP retrieval is presented. The toolkit is also used to better characterise the bias between different copies of passive microwave radiometers on-board polar-orbiting operational satellites. For the Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Simulator (ARTS), version 2, an optimised frequency grid for infrared broadband simulations is shown to be applicable for cloudy simulations. This frequency grid can and will be used to study the IWP signal in thermal infrared radiances. An outlook on a comparison between collocations and simulations is presented in the thesis.