Impact of the revisit frequency on cloud climatology for CALIPSO, EarthCARE, Aeolus, and ICESat-2 satellite lidar missions

Abstract. Space profiling lidars offer a unique insight into cloud properties in Earth’s atmosphere, and are considered the most reliable source of total (column-integrated) cloud amount (CA), and true (geometrical) cloud top height (CTH). However, lidar-based cloud climatologies suffer from infrequent sampling: every n-days, and only along the ground track. This study therefore evaluated four lidar missions, namely CALIPSO (revisit every n = 16 days), EarthCARE (n = 25), Aeolus (n = 7), and ICESat-2 (n = 91), to test the hypothesis that each mission provides accurate data on CA and CTH. CA/CTH values for a hypothetical daily revisit mission were used as reference (data simulated with Meteosat 15-minute cloud observations, assumed to be a proxy for ground truth). Our results demonstrated that this hypothesis is invalid, unless individual lidar transects are averaged over an area 10×10° in longitude and latitude (or larger). If this is not the case, the required accuracy of 1 % (for CA) or 150 m (for CTH) cannot be met, either for a single-year annual or monthly mean, or for a >10-year climatology. A CALIPSO-focused test demonstrated that the annual mean CA estimate is very sensitive to infrequent sampling, and that this factor alone can result in 14 % or 7 % average uncertainty with 1° or 2.5° resolution data, respectively. Consequently, applications that use gridded lidar data should consider calculating confidence intervals, or a similar measure of uncertainty. Our results suggest that CALIPSO, and its follow-on mission EarthCARE, are very likely to produce consistent cloud records despite the difference in sampling frequency.