Parsivel Disdrometer Support for MAGIC Field Campaign Report
In the Marine ARM GPCI Investigation of Clouds (MAGIC) field campaign, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility’s second Mobile Facility (AMF2) was deployed on the Horizon Lines cargo ship Spirit traversing a route between Los Angeles, California and Honolulu, Hawaii for one full year. The transect for this deployment was chosen specifically because it crosses the stratocumulus-to-cumulus transition of the North-East Pacific, a region of great climatic interest and a close approximation to the transect used for several focused model intercomparison efforts. The cloud type and cover along this transect vary from low marine stratocumulus with high areal coverage near the California coast to isolated shallow cumulus with much lower areal coverage in the trade wind regime near Hawaii. The low marine stratocumulus decks, with their high albedo, exert a major influence on the shortwave radiation budget in the ocean environment, and thus provide an extremely important forcing of Earth’s climate. The trade cumulus clouds play a large role in the global surface evaporation and also in Earth’s albedo. One of the important science drivers of the MAGIC campaign was to measure the properties of clouds and precipitation, specifically cloud type, fractional coverage, base height, physical thickness, liquid water path (LWP), optical depth, and drizzle and precipitation frequency, amount, and extent. Retrievals of cloud and precipitation properties during the MAGIC campaign relied critically on the calibration of the AMF2 radar systems. For MAGIC this included the KAZR and M-WACR, both fixed zenith-pointing systems, and the 1290 MHz beam steerable wind profiler.