Retrievals of ice-water content from an airborne elastic lidar in tropical convective clouds

Ice water content (IWC) is one of the critical parameters in determining the cloud radiative impact. In this work lidar-based IWC retrievals obtained in tropical mesoscale convective systems are evaluated in the context of an extensive in-situ and remote sensing instrumentation suite. Based on a test case of May 27, 2015 lidar-derived IWC values at 50 m above the aircraft were on average within 25% of the in-situ IWC measurements obtained using an isokinetic probe.