Extinction and optical depth retrievals for CALIPSO's Version 4 data release

Abstract

The Cloud–Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) on board the Cloud–Aerosol Lidar Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) satellite has been making near-global height-resolved measurements of cloud and aerosol layers since mid-June 2006. Version 4.10 (V4) of the CALIOP data products, released in November 2016, introduces extensive upgrades to the algorithms used to retrieve the spatial and optical properties of these layers, and thus there are both obvious and subtle differences between V4 and previous data releases. This paper describes the improvements made to the extinction retrieval algorithms and illustrates the impacts of these changes on the extinction and optical depth estimates reported in the CALIPSO lidar level 2 data products. The lidar ratios for both aerosols and ice clouds are generally higher than in previous data releases, resulting in generally higher extinction coefficients and optical depths in V4. A newly implemented algorithm for retrieving extinction coefficients in opaque layers is described and its impact examined. Precise lidar ratio estimates are also retrieved in these opaque layers. For semi-transparent cirrus clouds, comparisons between CALIOP V4 optical depths and the optical depths reported by MODIS collection 6 show substantial improvements relative to earlier comparisons between CALIOP version 3 and MODIS collection 5.