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A MISR Simulator for GCM Clouds: Cloud Top Height and Optical Depth Histograms from ISCCP and MISR

A MISR Simulator for GCM Clouds: Cloud Top Height and Optical Depth Histograms from ISCCP and MISR

Roger Marchand and Thomas Ackerman
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Joint histograms of Cloud Top Height (CTH) and Optical Depth (OD) derived by the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) are being widely used by the climate modeling community in evaluating global climate models. Similar joint histograms of CTH-OD are now being produced by the NASA Multi-angle Imaging Spectro Radiometer (MISR) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument teams. There are notable differences in the histograms being produced by these three projects. In this presentation we analyze some of the differences and discuss how the differences relate to the retrieval approaches used and what they tell us about the observed cloud fields.

Many comparisons between ISCCP and climate models use the ISCCP simulator constructed by Steve Klein and Mark Web. We have constructed a MISR simulator, similar in structure to this ISCCP simulator. In this presentation we will use our MISR simulator to compare output from the Multiscale Modeling Frame (MMF) climate model of Khairoutidinov and Randall with MISR retrievals. We plan to make the MISR simulator available to the scientific community and will provide information on how to obtain a copy and use the simulator at the end of the presentation.