ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP 1680-7324 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-8-6965-2008 Comparison of cloud statistics from spaceborne lidar systems Berthier S. 1 2 4 Chazette P. 2 Pelon J. 1 Baum B. 3 Service d'Aéronomie du CNRS, Institut Pierre-Simon-Laplace, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, 4, Place Jussieu–75252 Paris Cedex 05, France Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, Laboratoire mixte CEA-CNRS, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France Space Science and Engineering Center, 122 W Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA now at: Space Science and Engineering Center, 1225 W. Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA 03 12 2008 8 23 6965 6977 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/6965/2008/acp-8-6965-2008.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/6965/2008/acp-8-6965-2008.pdf

The distribution of clouds in a vertical column is assessed on the global scale through analysis of lidar measurements obtained from three spaceborne lidar systems: LITE (Lidar In-space Technology Experiment, NASA), GLAS (Geoscience Laser Altimeter System, NASA), and CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization). Cloud top height (CTH) is obtained from the LITE profiles based on a simple algorithm that accounts for multilayer cloud structures. The resulting CTH results are compared to those obtained by the operational algorithms of the GLAS and CALIOP instruments. Based on our method, spaceborne lidar data are analyzed to establish statistics on the cloud top height. The resulting columnar results are used to investigate the inter-annual variability in the lidar cloud top heights. Statistical analyses are performed for a range of CTH (high, middle, low) and latitudes (polar, middle latitude and tropical). Probability density functions of CTH are developed. Comparisons of CTH developed from LITE, for 2 weeks of data in 1994, with ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) cloud products show that the cloud fraction observed from spaceborne lidar is much higher than that from ISCCP. Another key result is that ISCCP products tend to underestimate the CTH of optically thin cirrus clouds. Significant differences are observed between LITE-derived cirrus CTH and both GLAS and CALIOP-derived cirrus CTH. Such a difference is due primarily to the lidar signal-to-noise ratio that is approximately a factor of 3 larger for the LITE system than for the other lidars. A statistical analysis for a full year of data highlights the influence of both the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and polar stratospheric clouds.

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