An Integrated Approach toward Retrieving Physically Consistent Profiles of Temperature, Humidity, and Cloud Liquid Water

Abstract

A method is presented for deriving physically consistent profiles of temperature, humidity, and cloud liquid water content. This approach combines a ground-based multichannel microwave radiometer, a cloud radar, a lidar-ceilometer, the nearest operational radiosonde measurement, and ground-level measurements of standard meteorological properties with statistics derived from results of a microphysical cloud model. All measurements are integrated within the framework of optimal estimation to guarantee a retrieved profile with maximum information content. The developed integrated profiling technique (IPT) is applied to synthetic cloud model output as a test of accuracy. It is shown that the liquid water content profiles obtained with the IPT are significantly more accurate than common methods that use the microwave-derived liquid water path to scale the radar reflectivity profile. The IPT is also applied to 2 months of the European Cloud Liquid Water Network (CLIWA-NET) Baltic Sea Experiment (BALTEX) BRIDGE main experiment (BBC) campaign data, considering liquid-phase, nonprecipitating clouds only. Error analysis indicates root-mean-square uncertainties of less than 1 K in temperature and less than 1 g m?3 in humidity, where the relative error in liquid water content ranges from 15% to 25%. A comparison of the vertically integrated humidity profile from the IPT with the nearest operational radiosonde shows an acceptable bias error of 0.13 kg m?2 when the Rosenkranz gas absorption model is used. However, if the Liebe gas absorption model is used, this systematic error increases to ?1.24 kg m?2, showing that the IPT humidity retrieval is significantly dependent on the chosen gas absorption model.