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Revisiting Liquid Water Content Retrievals in Warm Stratified Clouds: The Modified Frisch
Author(s) -
Küchler N.,
Kneifel S.,
Kollias P.,
Löhnert U.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2018gl079845
Subject(s) - drizzle , liquid water content , environmental science , radar , meteorology , remote sensing , radiometer , microwave radiometer , radiative transfer , aerosol , water content , cloud computing , microwave , atmospheric sciences , computer science , geology , physics , precipitation , telecommunications , quantum mechanics , operating system , geotechnical engineering
Accurate observations of liquid water content (LWC) in warm stratiform clouds are important for quantifying their radiative and hydrological effects and for studying aerosol‐cloud interactions. Retrieving LWC from radar reflectivity under drizzling or nondrizzling conditions has been investigated for several decades by the cloud remote sensing community. However, no physically plausible framework exists to address the biases introduced by drizzle on existing retrieval techniques. We present the modified Frisch retrieval (ModFrisch), which combines radar and microwave radiometer measurements to retrieve LWC in both nondrizzling and drizzling conditions. It is shown, using a 1‐D steady state microphysical model and a radar simulator, that the uncertainty of ModFrisch is up to four times smaller than the uncertainty of similar retrievals under drizzling conditions, enabling LWC profiling with an accuracy of 20%. The performance of the ModFrisch technique is evaluated using 1 year of observations.