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The present study investigated the correlations between aerosol and cloud parameters derived from satellite remote sensing to estimate properties of aerosol-cloud interactions. The global statistics showed that effective particle radius and optical thickness of low clouds correlate well with column number concentration of the aerosol particles in small - moderate amount of atmospheric aerosol loading (about Na < 109 [particles/cm2]), which are consistent with an aerosol indirect effect. In case of turbid atmosphere, inverse trends between aerosol and cloud microphysics parameters are appeared. These inverse tendencies can be founded in case of smaller LWP cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the grid system of the complex refractive index in the 1.6-μm (SW3) channel of the Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM-C)/Second Generation Global Imager (SGLI) satellite sensor is investigated. This grid system is separated into twelve patterns according to the step size of the real and imaginary parts of the refractive index. Specifically, the Light Scattering solver Applicable to particles of arbitrary Shape (LISAS)/Geometrical-Optics Approximation (GOA) technique is used to simulate the scattering of light by randomly oriented large hexagonal ice crystals. The difference of radiance with refractive index step size is calculated from developed light scattering database using the radiative transfer (R-STAR) solver. The results indicated that the step size of the real part is a significant factor in the difference of radiance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we retrieved microphysics of water clouds from MODIS on Aqua combined with the information of cloud top height from CloudSat and CALIPSO. This approach was different from the conventional method that used cloud top height from object analysis data. For the determination of the cloud top height, we developed radar-lidar fusion cloud mask scheme based on the one for ground observation described by Okamoto et al. [1]. The cloud mask from MODIS standard product was also evaluated against CloudSat and CALIPSO data. Then, the improved version of the algorithm developed by Nakajima and Nakajima [2] and Kawamoto et al. [3] was applied to MODIS with the cloud top height derived from CloudSat and CALIPSO instead of that derived from NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data and global analysis of liquid water cloud properties was carried out from the MODIS over A-train orbit path. We studied the statistical differences in cloud top height and microphysics between the results by the synergy approach and the conventional one. We found the results of the conventional methods largely affected by the contamination of ice clouds and this also lead to the overestimation of cloud top height as well as effective radius. Optical thickness agreed in both methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]