The Amount of Liquid Water in Global Clouds

Cloud liquid water is an important atmospheric parameter, forming a crucial link between hydrological and radiative properties of the climate system. Unfortunately, large discrepancies still exist between published estimates of the global mean value of this quantity. Studies relying on ground-based cloud cover climatologies and in situ microphysical measurements indicate significantly wetter global cloudiness than do satellite retrievals, which, in turn, also show considerable differences. This book, therefore, offers a critical analysis of the various global liquid water estimates in an attempt to narrow the gap between them. In so doing, the strengths and weaknesses of the two most common satellite remote sensing methods, those based on microwave brightness temperatures and those based on visible/near-infrared reflectances, are investigated and cataloged. Although retrieval differences cannot yet be fully reconciled, results presented here shed some light on needed improvements, and will help guide development of new observational techniques, eventually providing cloud liquid water data of sufficient quality to constrain global climate models.

Autorentext

BSc meteorology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, 1996; MSc and PhD atmospheric sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1999 and 2004. He is a junior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, specializing in the satellite remote sensing of cloud properties.