Recently, a team of researchers led by WANG Zhenzhu from Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (AIOFM), Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), together with their international collaborator from Institute of Atmospheric Optics (IAO) developed a prospective method, which is called Radar-Lidar Ratio, for retrieving cloud microphysics .
Cirrus clouds, which consists mainly of ice crystals, are important components of the atmosphere which essentially modulate the radiative budget of the Earth. The microphysical properties of the ice crystals as well as their number density are poorly known because of their great variability in time and space and difficulties of field measurements.
In this experiment, researchers calculated and analyzed the ratio of the backscattered signals of lidar and radar, for the first time, for typical shapes of ice crystals and wide distribution of the crystals over their sizes.
The results showed that the lidar-radar ratio is most sensitive to crystal sizes while the lidar depolarization ratio is most sensitive to crystal shapes, which will be a base for creation of algorithms inferring both sizes and shapes of the ice crystals in this cloud.
Since the China-Russia Research Center for Atmospheric Optics was jointly established in 2019, this international team conducted many researches exploring properties of cirrus clouds for up-to-date models of climate.
This research marked an important improvement on theory of lidar and radar exploring of cirrus clouds.
This work is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41975038); Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (2008085J33); Chinese Academy of Sciences (Youth Innovation Promotion Association 2017482, PIFI 2016VEA044).
Link to the paper: Radar-lidar ratio for ice crystals of cirrus clouds
Lidar-radar ratio and Lidar depolarization ratio for various crystal shapes (Image by WANG Zhenzhu)
Contact:
ZHAO Weiwei
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (http://english.hf.cas.cn/)
Email: annyzhao@ipp.ac.cn
