Evaluating spectral cloud effective radius retrievals from the Enhanced MODIS Airborne Simulator (eMAS) during ORACLES

Meyer, Kerry; Platnick, Steven; Arnold, G. Thomas; Amarasinghe, Nandana; Miller, Daniel; Small-Griswold, Jennifer; Witte, Mikael; Cairns, Brian; Gupta, Siddhant; McFarquhar, Greg; O'Brien, Joseph

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-981-2025

Articles | Volume 18, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-981-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

New observations and related modelling studies of the aerosol–cloud–climate...

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-981-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 4

Research article

|

27 Feb 2025

Research article |

| 27 Feb 2025

Evaluating spectral cloud effective radius retrievals from the Enhanced MODIS Airborne Simulator (eMAS) during ORACLES

Kerry Meyer, Steven Platnick, G. Thomas Arnold, Nandana Amarasinghe, Daniel Miller, Jennifer Small-Griswold, Mikael Witte, Brian Cairns, Siddhant Gupta, Greg McFarquhar, and Joseph O'Brien

Data sets

Enhanced MODIS Airborne Simulator (eMAS) Level-1B Calibrated and Geolocated Radiances for ORACLES (V02) NASA https://doi.org/10.5067/EMAS/EMASL1B.001

Enhanced MODIS Airborne Simulator (eMAS) Level-2 Cloud Products for ORACLES (eMASL2CLD) (V1.0) NASA https://doi.org/10.5067/EMAS/EMASL2CLD.001

Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP) L2 Cloud Product for ORACLES (V004) B. Cairns https://data.giss.nasa.gov/pub/rsp/data/ORACLES-2016/L2CLD/

ORACLES P-3 Orion Microphysics Files (R0) M. R. Poellot https://espoarchive.nasa.gov/archive/browse/oracles/P3/Microphysics

ORACLES ER-2 Housekeeping Data (R1) Y. Martin https://espoarchive.nasa.gov/archive/browse/oracles/ER2/Hskping

Short summary

Satellite remote sensing retrievals of cloud droplet size are used to understand clouds and their interactions with aerosols and radiation but require many simplifying assumptions. Evaluation of these retrievals is typically done by comparing against direct measurements of droplets from airborne cloud probes. This paper details an evaluation of proxy airborne remote sensing droplet size retrievals against several cloud probes and explores the impact of key assumptions on retrieval agreement.