| Summary: | The importance of arctic cloud properties to the surface radiative flux budget is well known and accurate representation of these clouds is essential to proper modeling of the Arctic environment. One of the cloud properties influencing the radiative budget is particle phase (McFarquhar and Cober, 2004; Curry and Ebert, 1992). The optical depth of a cloud layer decreases significantly when changing from all liquid to all ice. A good knowledge of the spatial variability of cloud properties is necessary for accurate model parameterizations (McFarquhar and Cober, 2004). An interesting characteristic of arctic clouds is the prevalence of mixed phase cloud layers. In these mixed phase clouds the water content tends to dominate the radiative effects, causing them to act as all liquid clouds. Measurements have shown these clouds to be highly inhomogeneous in terms of ice and liquid water content. The horizontal dimension is important to proper interpretation of remotely sensed data where properties are averaged over space and/or time. It is also of interest to the modeling community for the parameterization of sub-grid scale features. The objective of this research is to characterize the horizontal variability of the cloud microphysical properties sampled during the Mixed-Phase Arctic
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