Assessment of Southern Ocean clouds and aerosols in the New Zealand Earth System Model using shipborne and ground-based observations ...

• Main Authors: Kuma, Peter, McDonald, Adrian, Morgenstern, Olaf, Hartery, Sean, Harvey, Mike, Parsons, Simon
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2017
• Subjects: New Zealand; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3764267; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.3764267

One of the primary objectives of the New Zealand Earth System Model (NZESM) is to reduce shortwave radiation biases over the Southern Ocean, which are related to deficiencies in representation of clouds and aerosols in this region. This is a subject of active research with multiple hypotheses being tested including cloud microphysics, cloud-aerosol interaction, horizontal homogeneity and differences in frequency of cloud regimes related to different weather systems being examined. Comparison with observations is necessary for the identification and resolution of the deficiencies. Unfortunately, observations in the Southern Ocean are scarce, with satellites providing the most extensive spatial and temporal coverage, especially instruments such as MODIS and ISCCP and active instruments such as radar and lidar on the CloudSat and CALIPSO satellites. However, these instruments lack the capability to observe low-level cloud when there is a higher-level overlapping cloud. We present a new multi-year dataset of ...