9:00 AM - 9:15 AM
[ACG32-01] Mind the gap: Revisiting the capabilities of the satellite remote sensing of cloud properties
★Invited Papers
Keywords:Remote sensing, Cloud properties, Satellite observations
The global climate is in part regulated by complex radiative interactions in the surface-atmosphere system where clouds are among the leading factors to the uncertainty in the Earth’s radiation budget. Satellite remote sensing can provide global distributions of cloud properties. Since the satellite era, numerous efforts have been devoted to the development of spaceborne remote sensing techniques for the characterizations of cloud optical, radiative, and microphysical properties. As a multidecadal record of these cloud property datasets has been built to date, these datasets are nowadays indispensable for observational climate research. Despite multidecadal efforts on spaceborne remote sensing of cloud properties, however, accurate cloud property retrieval is still challenging to date partly due to insufficient observational information and inappropriate assumptions made in the remote sensing algorithms. This obstacle becomes more unambiguous, given a recent significant demand for spaceborne datasets for process-oriented cloud microphysics studies. The goal of my talk is to address the capabilities and limitations of the current remote sensing techniques for cloud property characterizations. In the presentation, I will first go over the current status of the remote sensing techniques for cloud property characterizations and summarize the gaps between what we have and what we want from spaceborne remote sensing for atmospheric science research. Then, I will briefly introduce a couple of potential pathways to overcoming the gaps in satellite remote sensing for characterizing cloud microphysical properties and discuss how we move forward.