Estimation of Liquid Cloud Properties that Conserve Total-Scene Reflectance Using Satellite Measurements

A new method of deriving statistical moments related to the distribution of liquid water path over partially cloudy scenes is tested using a satellite cloud climatology. The method improves the ability to reconstruct total-scene visible reflectance when compared with an approach that relies on valid liquid water path retrievals, and thus it maintains physical consistency with the primary satellite observations when deriving cloud climatologies. A global application of the new method finds a mean bias of −0.008 ± 0.017 when reconstructing total-scene reflectance from liquid water path distributions, as compared with a bias of 0.05 ± 0.047 when using a conventional approach. Application of the method to a multidecadal cloud climatology suggests that this may provide a means of identifying data artifacts that could affect long-term cloud property trends. The conservation of reflectance plus the ease of applicability to various satellite datasets makes this method a valuable tool for model validation...