Sub-visual cirrus LIDAR measurements for satellite masking improvement

Understanding the impact of cirrus cloud on modifying both the solar reflected and terrestrial emitted radiations is crucial for climate studies. Unlike most boundary layer stratus and stratocumulus clouds that have a net cooling effect on the climate, high-level thin cirrus clouds have a warming effect on our climate. However, the satellites as GOES from the NOAA series are limited to the cloud top and its reflectivity or brightness temperature, without assessing accurately the optical depth or physical thickness. Other more recent sensors as MODIS are able to determine optical depths for aerosols and clouds but when related to cirrus they are still inaccurate. Research programs as First ISCCP, FIRE, HOIST, ECLIPS and ARM have concentrated efforts in the research of cirrus, being based mainly on the observations of combined terrestrial remote sensing and airplanes instruments. LIDARs are able to detect sub-visual cirrus cloud (SVCs) in altitudes above 15 km and estimate exactly their height, thickness and optical depth, contributing with information for satellites sensors and radiative transfer models. In order to research characteristics of SVCs, the LIDAR system at Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares has as objective to determine such parameters and implement a cirrus cloud mask that could be used in the satellite images processing as well as in the qualitative improvement of the radiative parameters for numerical models of climate changes. The first preliminary study shows where we compare the data lidar with Brightness temperature differences between the split-window data from GOES-10 (DSA/INPE) and CALIPSO.