Observations of Tropical Tropopause Layer clouds from a balloon-borne lidar
Résumé
Tropical Tropopause Layer (TTL) clouds have a significant impact on the Earth's radiative budget and regulate the amount of water vapor entering the stratosphere. During the Strateole-2 observation campaign, three microlidars were flown onboard stratospheric superpressure balloons from October 2021 to late January 2022, slowly drifting only a few kilometers above the TTL. These measurements have unprecedented sensitivity to thin cirrus and provide a fine-scale description of cloudy structures both in time and space. Case studies of collocated observations with the space-borne lidar Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) show a very good agreement between the instruments and highlight the unique ability of the microlidar to detect optically very thin clouds below CALIOP detection capacity (optical depth τ < 2 • 10 −3). Statistics on cloud occurrence show that TTL cirrus appear in more than 50 % of the microlidar profiles and have a mean geometrical depth of 1 km. Ultrathin TTL cirrus (τ < 2 • 10 −3) have a significant coverage (16 % of the profiles) and their mean geometrical depth is below 500 m.
Domaines
Planète et Univers [physics]Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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