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

International audienceA new combined radar and lidar inversion procedure has been developed for cloud 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) and the Cloud Lidar and Radar Experiment (CLARE' 98) campaigns. The results compare well with simultaneous IR-radiometer cloud measurements as well as measurements made in ice-clouds using aircraft mounted 2D probe particle-sizing instruments. In addition, the reflectivities calculated from the in-situ measurements alone are seen to consistent with the observed reflectivities