Evaluating Himawari-8 Cloud Products Using Shipborne and CALIPSO Observations: Cloud-top Height and Cloud-top Temperature

Cloud-top height (CTH) and cloud-top temperature (CTT) retrieved from the Himawari-8 observations are evaluated using the active shipborne radar-lidar observations derived from the 31-day “Clouds, Aerosols, Precipitation Radiation and atmospherIc Composition Over the southeRn oceaN” (CAPRICORN) expe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology
Main Authors: Huang, Y, Siems, S, Manton, M, Majewski, L, Protat, A, Nguyen, H
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: American Meteorological Society 2019
Subjects:
Southern Ocean
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11343/227606
https://doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-18-0231.1
Description
Summary:Cloud-top height (CTH) and cloud-top temperature (CTT) retrieved from the Himawari-8 observations are evaluated using the active shipborne radar-lidar observations derived from the 31-day “Clouds, Aerosols, Precipitation Radiation and atmospherIc Composition Over the southeRn oceaN” (CAPRICORN) experiment in 2016 and one-year observations from the space-borne Cloud- Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) cloud product over a large sector of the Southern Ocean. The results show that the Himawari-8 CTH (CTT) retrievals agree reasonably well with both the shipborne estimates, with a correlation coefficient of 0.837 (0.820), a mean bias error of 0.226 km (-2.526°C), and an RMSE of 1.684 km (10.069°C), respectively. In the comparison with CALIOP, the corresponding quantities are found to be 0.786 (0.480), -0.570 km (1.343°C), and 2.297 km (25.176°C). The Himawari-8 CTH (CTT) generally falling between the physical CTHs observed by CALIOP and the ship-borne radar-lidar estimates. However, major systematic biases are also identified. These errors include (i) a low (warm) bias in CTH (CTT) for warm liquid cloud type, (ii) a cold bias in CTT for supercooled liquid water cloud type, (iii) a lack of CTH at ~3 km that does not have a corresponding gap in CTT, (iv) a tendency of misclassifying some low- / mid-top clouds as cirrus and overlap cloud types, and (v) a saturation of CTH (CTT) around 10 km (-40°C), particularly for cirrus and overlap cloud types. Various challenges that underpin these biases are also explored, including the potential of parallax bias, low-level inversion, and cloud heterogeneity.

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