Low-level Arctic clouds: a blind zone in our knowledge of the radiation budget

Abstract

Quantifying the role of clouds in the earth's radiation budget is essential for improving our understanding of the drivers and feedback mechanisms of climate change. This holds in particular for the Arctic, the region currently undergoing the most rapid changes. This region, however, also poses significant challenges to remote-sensing retrievals of clouds and radiative fluxes, introducing large uncertainties in current climate data records. In particular, low-level stratiform clouds are common in the Arctic but are, due to their low altitude, challenging to observe and characterize with remote-sensing techniques. The availability of reliable ground-based observations as reference is thus of high importance. In the present study, radiative transfer simulations using state-of-the-art ground-based remote sensing of clouds are contrasted with surface radiative flux measurements to assess their ability to constrain the cloud radiative effect. Cloud radar, lidar, and microwave radiometer observations from the PS106 cruise in the Arctic marginal sea ice zone in summer 2017 were used to derive cloud micro- and macrophysical properties by means of the instrument synergy approach of Cloudnet. Closure of surface radiative fluxes can only be achieved by a realistic representation of the low-level liquid-containing clouds in the radiative transfer simulations. The original, most likely erroneous, representation of these low-level clouds in the radiative transfer simulations led to errors in the cloud radiative effect of 54 W m−2. In total, the proposed method could be applied to 11 % of the observations. For the data, where the proposed method was utilized, the average relative error decreased from 109 % to 37 % for the simulated solar and from 18 % to 2.5 % for the simulated terrestrial downward radiative fluxes at the surface. The present study highlights the importance of jointly improving retrievals for low-level liquid-containing clouds which are frequently encountered in the high Arctic, together with observational capabilities both in terms of cloud remote sensing and radiative flux observations. Concrete suggestions for achieving these goals are provided.