ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-7-4065-2007 Global statistics of liquid water content and effective number density of water clouds over ocean derived from combined CALIPSO and MODIS measurements Hu Y. 1 Vaughan M. 1 McClain C. 2 Behrenfeld M. 3 Maring H. 4 Anderson D. 4 Sun-Mack S. 1 Flittner D. 1 Huang J. 1 Wielicki B. 1 Minnis P. 1 Weimer C. 5 Trepte C. 1 Kuehn R. 1 NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA NASA Headquarter, Washington, D.C., USA Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Builder, CO, USA 28 03 2007 7 2 4065 4083 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/4065/2007/acpd-7-4065-2007.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/4065/2007/acpd-7-4065-2007.pdf

This study presents an empirical relation that links layer integrated depolarization ratios, the extinction coefficients, and effective radii of water clouds, based on Monte Carlo simulations of CALIPSO lidar observations. Combined with cloud effective radius retrieved from MODIS, cloud liquid water content and effective number density of water clouds are estimated from CALIPSO lidar depolarization measurements in this study. Global statistics of the cloud liquid water content and effective number density are presented.

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