Synergetic use of POLDER and MODIS for multilayered cloud identification

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Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of identifying overlapping clouds that contain thin cirrus overlying a lower-level water cloud by synergetic use of POLDER-3 (Polarization and Directionality of the Earth Reflectance) and MODIS (MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data. When thin cirrus clouds overlap the liquid cloud layer, the liquid information may be obtained by POLDER observations and the presence of the cirrus may be inferred from the MODIS CO2-slicing technique. An initial comparison of the POLDER cloud phase and the MODIS cloud-top pressure for one scene over East Asia also shows that a large portion of clouds declared as liquid water clouds by POLDER-3 correspond to the lower cloud-top pressures derived from MODIS. As a result, an overlapped cloud identification method is proposed under the assumption that the multilayered cloud would be present if the POLDER cloud phase is liquid water and the MODIS cloud-top pressure is less than 500hPa. For the studied scene, the comparison of the multilayered cloud identification results with CloudSat and CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) observations illustrates that the proposed method could detect multilayered clouds when the upper cirrus has a visible optical thickness of less than 2.0. Then the identification results are compared with the MODIS Cloud_Multi_Layer_Flag. It is indicated that the consistency between the multilayered clouds from the proposed synergy and MODIS-operational algorithm increases gradually from over 40% to nearly 100% with the increase of the confidence level of the MODIS multilayered clouds from the lowest to the highest. Further analysis suggests that the majority of multilayered clouds falsely classified as single-layered clouds by the proposed method may correspond to relatively thick cirrus covering lower-level water clouds. Additionally, an index by using the multilayered cloud detection differences from the two methods is proposed to provide some information on the optical thickness of the cirrus covering lower-level water cloud. Finally, quantitative comparisons are extended to four other scenes at different locations by using active measurements. The results also show that the mean visible optical thickness of the high-level clouds of the multilayered clouds detected by both methods (1.57) is remarkably less than that by only MODIS-operational method (2.84), which means that the differences between the results from the two methods are mainly caused by the different sensitivities to the visible optical thickness of the high-level cloud and could be used to indicate the range of the visible optical thickness of the cirrus clouds covering the lower-level water clouds. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.

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Yao, Z., Han, Z., Zhao, Z., Lin, L., & Fan, X. (2010). Synergetic use of POLDER and MODIS for multilayered cloud identification. Remote Sensing of Environment, 114(9), 1910–1923. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2010.03.014

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