Validating Air Force Weather's Passively Sensed World Wide Merged Cloud Analysis (WWMCA) against the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) Lidar

The 557th Weather Wing (557WW) creates the global World Wide Merged Cloud Analysis (WWMCA) using passively sensed techniques from a group of polar orbiting and geostationary satellite sources. In addition to the presence of cloud, the system also assigns cloud tops and bases for up to four layers of cloud. In recent years, the 557WW has produced a WWMCA reanalysis product in a non-real time environment to use in validation and climatology applications. This reanalysis maximizes the available satellite data by creating the analysis only once all of the possible satellite data has arrived and been processed.

This work compared the seasonal behavior of the WWMCA reanalysis cloud heights to a dataset from the NASA Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) lidar over a two year period from 2015-2017. In addition to the ability to examine behavior by season, latitude and surface type, the orbit plane of CATS on the International Space Station allows for the examination of performance across a range of local times giving greater insight to cloud behavior differences between the reanalysis and lidar dataset for various times of the day.