Enhanced Cloud algorithm from collocated CALIPSO, CloudSat and MODIS global boundary layer lapse rate studies

Coincident profile information from CALIPSO's lidar and CloudSat's radar offers a unique opportunity to map the vertical structure of clouds over the globe with accuracies never before realized. At Langley NASA, both CALIPSO and CloudSat are collocated with each MODIS 1-km pixel to create a new data set named C3M (Figure 1). A year (July 2006 - June 2007) of C3M data is used to derive global lapse rate maps, as an enhancement to NASA Langley's CERES Cloud Property Retrieval System (CCPRS). The lapse rates are derived for boundary layer clouds using the the cloud-top temperature from Aqua MODIS level 1 data, skin temperature over ocean and surface temperature over land from the GMAO GEOS-4, and cloud-top height from CALIPSO. The derived global lapse rate maps are used to process a month of CERES-MODIS data to calculate cloud top heights, which are compared with CALIPSO cloud top height. The comparisons shows good agreement between CERES-MODIS and CALIPSO.