Thomas Fauchez

Scale dependence of cirrus heterogeneity effects. Part II: MODIS VNIR and SWIR channels

In a context of global climate change, the understanding of the radiative role of clouds is crucial. On average, ice clouds such as cirrus have a significant positive radiative effect, but under some conditions the effect may be negative. However, many uncertainties remain regarding the role of ice clouds on Earth’s radiative budget and in a changing climate. Global satellite observations are particularly well suited to monitoring clouds, retrieving their characteristics and inferring their radiative impact. To retrieve ice cloud properties (optical thickness and ice crystal effective size), current operational algorithms assume that each pixel of the observed scene is plane-parallel and homogeneous, and that there is no radiative connection between neighboring pixels. Yet these retrieval assumptions are far from accurate, as real radiative transfer is 3-D. This leads to the plane-parallel and homogeneous bias (PPHB) plus the independent pixel approximation bias (IPAB), which impacts both the estimation of top-ofthe-atmosphere (TOA) radiation and the retrievals. An important factor that determines the impact of these assumptions is the sensor spatial resolution. High-spatial-resolution pixels can better represent cloud variability (low PPHB), but the radiative path through the cloud can involve many pixels (high IPAB). In contrast, low-spatial-resolution pixels poorly represent the cloud variability (high PPHB), but the radiation is better contained within the pixel field of view (low IPAB). In addition, the solar and viewing geometry (as well as cloud optical properties) can modulate the magnitude of the PPHB and IPAB. In this, Part II of our study, we simulate TOA 0.86 and 2.13μm solar reflectances over a cirrus uncinus scene produced by the 3DCLOUD model. Then, 3-D radiative transfer simulations are performed with the 3DMCPOL code at spatial resolutions ranging from 50 m to 10 km, for 12 viewing geometries and nine solar geometries. It is found that, for simulated nadir observations taken at resolution higher than 2.5 km, horizontal radiation transport (HRT) dominates biases between 3-D and 1-D reflectance calculations, but these biases are mitigated by the side illumination and shadowing effects for off-zenith solar geometries. At resolutions coarser than 2.5 km, PPHB dominates. For offnadir observations at resolutions higher than 2.5 km, the effect that we call THEAB (tilted and homogeneous extinction approximation bias) due to the oblique line of sight passing through many cloud columns contributes to a large increase of the reflectances, but 3-D radiative effects such as shadowing and side illumination for oblique Sun are also important. At resolutions coarser than 2.5 km, the PPHB is again the dominant effect. The magnitude and resolution dependence of PPHB and IPAB is very different for visible, nearinfrared and shortwave infrared channels compared with the thermal infrared channels discussed in Part I of this study. The contrast of 3-D radiative effects between solar and thermal infrared channels may be a significant issue for retrieval techniques that simultaneously use radiative measurements across a wide range of solar reflectance and infrared wavelengths. Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 12106 T. Fauchez et al.: Cirrus heterogeneity effects for MODIS NIR and SWIR channels

A fast hybrid (3-D/1-D) model for thermal radiative transfer in cirrus via successive orders of scattering: FAST MODEL FOR 3-D THERMAL RT IN CIRRUS

We investigate the impact of cirrus cloud heterogeneity on the direct emission by cloud or surface and on the scattering by ice particles in the thermal infrared (TIR). Realistic 3-D cirri are modeled with the 3DCLOUD code, and top-of-atmosphere radiances are simulated by the 3-D Monte Carlo radiative transfer (RT) algorithm 3DMCPOL for two (8.65 micrometers and 12.05 micrometers) channels of the Imaging Infrared Radiometer on CALIPSO. At nadir, comparisons of 1-D and 3-D RT show that 3-D radiances are larger than their 1-D counterparts for direct emission but smaller for scattered radiation. For our cirrus cases, 99% of the 3-D total radiance is computed by the third scattering order, which corresponds to 90% of the total computational effort, but larger optical thicknesses need more scattering orders. To radically accelerate the 3-D RT computations (using only few percent of 3-D RT time with a Monte Carlo code), even in the presence of large optical depths, we develop a hybrid model based on exact 3-D direct emission, the first scattering order from 1-D in each homogenized column, and an empirical adjustment linearly dependent on the optical thickness to account for higher scattering orders. Good agreement is found between the hybrid model and the exact 3-D radiances for two very different cirrus models without changing the empirical parameters. We anticipate that a future deterministic implementation of the hybrid model will be fast enough to process multiangle thermal imagery in a practical tomographic reconstruction of 3-D cirrus fields.