RAMM/CIRA 1st Quarter Report
Cloud Simulation: An observational operator was used to simulate an altostratus cloud composed of primarily supercooled water droplets. Predicted brightness temperatures at 3.9 µm and 10.35 µm were very close to the observed values. Sensitivity tests were also performed by varying droplet size and concentration to see the resulting changes in brightness temperatures. Tests of this nature are very useful in understanding satellite measurements of clouds, especially with channels from the future ABI aboard GOES-R. (D. Lindsey)
Code Developed: Code has been developed that computes the effective radius of an entire gamma sized distribution; in addition, the effective radius within bins of a gamma sized distribution can also be calculated. The effective radius is used to lookup explicitly calculated optical properties of ice clouds. These optical properties are used to compute 3.9 µm spectral radiance values. This method is being used to study highly reflective thunderstorm tops. (L. Grasso, D. Lindsey, and M. Sengupta)