Remote sounding through semi-transparent cirrus cloud

Abstract

A large portion of the earth is covered by thin semi-transparent cirrus cloud. The cirrus results from the natural injection of moisture into the upper troposphere by deep convection (i.e., anvils) and from man-made moisture injected into the upper troposphere by jet aircraft. Although most cirrus clouds are semi-transparent to infrared wavelengths, their heights, thicknesses, and spectral absorption properties must be known in order to retrieve atmospheric temperature and moisture profiles from the data. An algorithm is developed for accounting for the radiative properties of semi-transparent cloud in the retrieval of vertical temperature and moisture profiles. The algorithm is to be applied to the NASA ER2 HIS data collected during the FIRE cirrus field program.