Paquita Zuidema and Chris Fairall
For boundary-layer marine clouds, the accurate quantification of cloud radiative impacts (both plane-parallel and three-dimensional), aerosol indirect effects, and the development of useful cloud parameterizations, is to first-order influenced by how well the cloud liquid water paths (LWPs) are known. Liquid water paths retrieved from surface-based microwave radiometers potentially provide the best available measurements, but establishing a high accuracy requires care.
In this poster results are presented from a physical-iteration LWP retrieval applied to surface-based microwave radiometer measurements gathered during two ship research cruises. The approach relies on a priori information on the atmospheric water vapor paths (from soundings) and cloud temperature. Adiabatic ascent LWP calculations can help assess the realism of the retrieval for these stratus clouds. The cruises were conducted in the southeastern Pacific stratus region off of the Peruvian coast in October, 2001 and November, 2003, as part of the NOAA Pan-American Climate Studies program. Both cruises spent approximately a week at a buoy site at 20S and 85W.
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