Clouds have a large impact on the Earth’s radiation and energy budget and play consequently a crucial role in prediction of climate change. At the same time, they are highly variable in time and space. To study and distinguish the different influences of clouds on the climate system it is useful to separate clouds into individual cloud regimes. In this thesis a new cloud classification and their response to disturbed cloud droplet number concentration is presented. Liquid water clouds at cloud scale are separated on the basis of cloud properties derived from combined A-Train satellite measurements involving the MODIS measurements
onboard Aqua, the CloudSat cloud radar and the CALIPSO cloud lidar.
Using the combined MODIS and CALIPSO cloud-top phase discrimination, liquid water clouds are identified. The high resolved vertical measurements of the CALIPSO lidar provide three cloud base height classes and the spatial variability of cloud top height within a 20 km footprint as an inhomogeneity parameter from which two cloud inhomogeneity classes are defined resulting in a total of six liquid cloud classes. The classification smoothly disentangles marine and continental clouds as well as stratiform and cumuliform clouds in different latitudes at the high spatial resolution of about 20 km. Analyzing the cloud droplet effective radius reff , cloud optical thickness τc , adiabatic liquid water path Lad, adiabatic cloud droplet number concentration Nc,ad and cloud geometrical thickness Hthick,CC derived
from collocated combined MODIS, CloudSat and CALIPSO measurements shows a useful discrimination between cloud regimes.
Further separations between non precipitating and precipitating clouds using the CloudSat precipitation flag as well as between three classes of free tropospheric relative humidity from a meteorological reanalysis above cloud top are made to investigate adjustments to aerosol-cloud interactions for individual cloud regimes. For this, the cloud liquid water path response, cloud thickness response, and cloud fraction response to perturbed cloud droplet concentration is analyzed. All sensitivities depend on the chosen cloud or environmental parameter indicating the importance of analyzing aerosol-cloud interactions for particular cloud regimes since similar clouds with similar cloud parameter responses are grouped together helping to identify individual behavior of these cloud regimes to perturbations in cloud droplet number concentration.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:21073 |
| Date | 10 April 2018 |
| Creators | Unglaub, Claudia |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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