What Has CloudSat Taught Us About Earth’s Energy Balance?

Abstract:

Far exceeding its proposed 22-month lifetime, CloudSat, in combination with its companions in the A-Train, has provided more than a decade of insights into the vertical structure of atmospheric radiative heating and its role in shaping Earth’s energy budget. From my graduate student research developing retrieval algorithms to evaluating and analyzing the resulting datasets, the CloudSat mission has also played a central role in shaping my scientific career. This presentation will highlight some of the significant advances in understanding Earth’s energy balance enabled by CloudSat’s multi-sensor flux and heating rate product. Emphasis will be placed on the value of the new vertical dimension afforded by spaceborne active sensors for addressing challenging questions such as quantifying the radiative effects of mixed-phase and multi-layered clouds, determining aerosol direct radiative forcing in cloudy skies, estimating radiative forcing from aerosol-cloud interactions, and assessing the impact of clouds on Arctic surface energy balance. Classical views of the role of clouds in Earth’s energy budget will be revisited and revised to demonstrate how these unique observations continue to reveal new aspects of energy flows in the climate system that were inaccessible prior to the A-Train.