Clouds play a very important role in the global atmospheric circulation and climate. Clouds directly and indirectly affect the Earth's radiation balance, atmospheric physics and chemistry processes and, therefore, affect the weather, air quality, and daily human life. A better characterization and understanding of clouds and their interactions with atmospheric systems are critical for improving cloud models, which in turn would improve the forecasting of precipitation and severe weather.

To facilitate cloud research and application, NASA GES DISC has developed the Clouds Synergy Tool (CST), available to the public through Giovanni (NASA Goddard Interactive Online Visualization ANd ANalysis Infrastructure). The CST provides capabilities to visualize, analyze, and inter-compare cloud types, cloud phases, and cloud property data from AIRS, MODIS (Terra and Aqua), OMI, and TRMM. The multi-sensor and multi-frequency cloud data from various satellites provide a much more complete view of clouds, cloud properties, and cloud structures, over land and oceans. This poster presents preliminary results from the CST and demonstrates the use of the tool to explore and investigate clouds and cloud systems and their interactions with atmospheric processes, and to inter-compare MODIS and AIRS clouds and cloud properties for improving satellite cloud retrieval algorithms and cloud parameterizations.

The CST will be further extended to cloud data from CloudSat, PARASOL, CERES, and other satellites/instruments, as well as to other cloud-related parameters, such as precipitation, temperature, aerosol, outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), and latent heating.

NASA Goddard Giovanni URL: http://Giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov