Meridionally tilted ice cloud structures in the tropical upper troposphere as seen by CloudSat

Gong, J.; Wu, D. L.; Limpasuvan, V.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-6271-2015

Articles | Volume 15, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-6271-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-6271-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 11

Research article

|

09 Jun 2015

Research article |

| 09 Jun 2015

Meridionally tilted ice cloud structures in the tropical upper troposphere as seen by CloudSat

J. Gong, D. L. Wu, and V. Limpasuvan

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Final revised paper (published on 09 Jun 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Sep 2014)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C8537: 'Review for Meridionally-Tilted Ice Cloud Structures in the Tropical Upper Troposphere as Seen by CloudSat', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Oct 2014
- AC C12537: 'Response to reviewer#1's comment', Jie Gong, 09 Mar 2015
RC C8766: 'Review of “Meridionally-tilted ice cloud structures in the tropical Upper Troposphere as seen by CloudSat”, by J. Gong et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Nov 2014
- AC C12538: 'Response to reviewer#2's comment', Jie Gong, 09 Mar 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Jie Gong on behalf of the Authors (21 Mar 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 Mar 2015) by Corinna Hoose

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (08 Apr 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors did a good job at answering my questions and improving
the manuscript. In particular, the domain map is helpful and the maps
overall are more readable now. However, I need a few more clarification
in the text, in particular around the domain of the study — tropical
or tropical+midlatitude. See below for comments.

Page 5, line 1:

The authors cite Austin et al. (2009) for a 40% error estimate. Austin et
al. are wrong, the errors are larger. Although there may not be an
authoritative source to cite on this, the intercomparison by Eliasson
et al. (2003, JGR, doi:10.1029/2012JD018381) should be of interest.

Page 5, line 10 onward:

I still think there is a scope issue with this paper. Either the authors
want to extend the analysis to mid-latitude, or they don't. In the
answer to reviewers, the authors state that "this paper is focused
on the tropics", as is indeed indicated in the title. Then why do
Figures 1(b) and 2(b) include a swath at 50°S, and Figures 3 and 4 use
a domain up to ±45°? Either the authors need to use proper analysis
(e.g. different layer settings) for the mid-latitudes and make clear in
title and abstract that the paper considers tropics and mid-latitudes,
or they should show results only from the tropics.

Page 5, line 13:

Ok, I see what the authors mean now.

Page 6, line 4:

The authors still need to the text that for their reasoning they mean
"uniformly randomly distributed in the horizontal direction". Of course,
this is a hypothetical construction, but the reasoning does require the
assumption of a uniform distribution (it is easy to come up with other
distributions where the conclusion fails that the two ways of integrating
IWP would show no difference).

Page 7, line 1: See my comment for page 5, line 10

Page 21, Figure 1c: in the illustration, the northward view and southward
view appears a factor of sqrt(2) longer than the nadir view, which is
rather a factor sec(77°)=4.4 longer. Of course, as calculated by the
authors, this does not mean a factor 4.4 more IWP. To avoid giving the
impression that the slant path is longer than the vertical path, I would
indeed delete the two slantwise line-of-sight arrow lines, and possibly
replace this by a small vertical arrow in each of the individual squares
that make up the slant path, to illustrate the mock slantwise path.

Also on Figure 1c: I didn't notice the 77° indication earlier. It is
good that this is now mentioned in the caption. Perhaps the authors
could indicate this with an arrow (probably at the northward rather view
because the space above the southward view is already taken by the arrow
indicating the cloudsat motion)

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (15 Apr 2015)

ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (15 Apr 2015) by Corinna Hoose

AR by Jie Gong on behalf of the Authors (24 Apr 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (15 May 2015) by Corinna Hoose

Short summary

Upper-tropospheric ice clouds (anvil and cirrus cloud ouflows extending from deep convection) have small-scale (~1km horizontal) structures that are organized and systematically tilt poleward in the tropics, as revealed by CloudSat ice water path (IWP) and Aura MLS Radiance (TB) measurements. These tilted cloud structures cover regions over hundreds of kilometers, contributing up to 20% of IWP uncertainty if not accounted for in remote sensing from space.