Estimating the optical extinction of liquid water clouds in the cloud base region

Sarna, Karolina; Donovan, David P.; Russchenberg, Herman W. J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-4959-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-4959-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-4959-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 7

Research article

|

16 Jul 2021

Research article |

| 16 Jul 2021

Estimating the optical extinction of liquid water clouds in the cloud base region

Karolina Sarna, David P. Donovan, and Herman W. J. Russchenberg

Model code and software

karrolcia/Klett_lidar_inversion: Klett Lidar Inverison (Version 1) K. Sarna https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5090535

Short summary

We show a method for obtaining cloud optical extinction with a lidar system. We use a scheme in which a lidar signal is inverted based on the estimated value of cloud extinction at the far end of the cloud and apply a correction for multiple scattering within the cloud and a range resolution correction. By applying our technique, we show that it is possible to obtain the cloud optical extinction with an error better than 5 % up to 90 m within the cloud.