Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net 1680-7367 1680-7375 9 3 2009 10.5194/acpd-9-12027-2009 http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/12027/2009/ http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/12027/2009/acpd-9-12027-2009.html http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/12027/2009/acpd-9-12027-2009.pdf 12027 12064 2009-05-15 Retrieval of cloud liquid water distributions from a single scanning microwave radiometer aboard a moving platform – Part 1: Field trial results from the Wakasa Bay experiment D. Huang dhuang@bnl.gov A. Gasiewksi W. Wiscombe Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (code 913), Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA Tomographic methods offer a new promise for retrieving three-dimensional distributions of cloud liquid water from path-integrated radiometric measurements by passive sensors. A mobile cloud tomography system using only a single scanning microwave radiometer has many advantages over a fixed system using multiple distinctly-located radiometers, e.g., efficient and flexible data collection. Part 1 (this paper) examines the results from a limited cloud tomography trial carried out during the 2003 AMSR-E validation campaign at Wakasa Bay of the Sea of Japan. During the tomographic test, the Polarimetric Scanning Radiometer (PSR) and Microwave Imaging Radiometer (MIR) aboard the NASA P-3 research aircraft scanned through a system of low-level clouds and thus provided a useful dataset for testing the cloud tomography method. We conduct three retrieval runs with a constrained inversion algorithm using, respectively the PSR, MIR, and combined PSR and MSR data. The liquid water paths calculated from the PSR retrieval are consistent with that from the MIR retrieval. 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