We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
16 year climatology of cirrus clouds over a tropical station in southern India using ground and space-based lidar observations.
- Authors
Pandit, A. K.; Gadhavi, H. S.; Ratnam, M. Venkat; Raghunath, K.; Rao, S. V. B.; Jayaraman, A.
- Abstract
16 year (1998-2013) climatology of cirrus clouds and their macrophysical (base height, top height and geometrical thickness) and optical properties (cloud optical thickness) observed using a ground-based lidar over Gadanki (13.5° N, 79.2° E), India, is pre- sented. The climatology obtained from the ground-based lidar is compared with the climatology obtained from seven and half years (June 2006-December 2013) of Cloud- Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) observations. A very good agreement is found between the two climatologies in spite of their opposite viewing geometries and difference in sampling frequencies. Nearly 50-55% of cirrus clouds were found to possess geometrical thickness less than 2 km. Ground-based lidar is found to detect more number of sub-visible clouds than CALIOP which has implications for global warming studies as sub-visible cirrus clouds have significant positive radiative forcing. Cirrus clouds with mid-cloud temperatures between -50 to -70 ° C have a mean geometrical thickness greater than 2km in contrast to the earlier reported value of 1.7 km. Trend analyses reveal a statistically significant increase in the altitude of sub-visible cirrus clouds which is consistent with the recent climate model simulations. Also, the fraction of sub-visible cirrus cloud is found to be increasing during the last sixteen years (1998 to 2013) which has implications to the temperature and water vapour budget in the tropical tropopause layer.
- Subjects
SOUTH India; CIRRUS clouds; LIDAR; AEROSOLS; CLIMATOLOGY
- Publication
Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics Discussions, 2015, Vol 15, Issue 11, p15791
- ISSN
1680-7367
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5194/acpd-15-15791-2015