Tropical thin cirrus retrievals of particle size and optical depth from AIRS

AIRS radiances and standard retrievals were used to obtain thin cirrus particle size and optical depth over the tropical oceans. (a) Normalized probability distribution of cloud top temperature for a total of 29 days. Histograms are partitioned into 5 bins of (0.0-0.1, 0.1-0.25, 0.25-0.5, 0.5-0.75, and 0.75-1.0). (B) Joint probability distributions of cloud top temperature and particle size for the same time period and intervals as (A). (C) Histograms of particle size for the same bins listed in (B). These results illustrate the usefulness of AIRS to characterize the cloudy atmosphere in the upper tropical troposphere. They also show that particle size tends to increase with optical depth and cloud top temperature, results that are consistent from other studies that use satellite, surface-based, or aircraft observational platforms.

Citation
Kahn, B. H., Chahine, M. T., Stephens, G. L., Mace, G. G., Marchand, R. T., Wang, Z., Barnet, C. D., Eldering, A., Holz, R. E., Kuehn, R. E., and Vane, D. G.: Cloud type comparisons of AIRS, CloudSat, and CALIPSO cloud height and amount, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 8, 1231-1248, 2008.