Accurate liquid water path retrieval from low-cost microwave radiometers using additional information from a lidar ceilometer and operational forecast models

Water clouds have an important impact on the radiative balance of the earth. The use of ground-based dual-frequency microwave radiometers to derive both liquid water path (LWP) and water vapor path (WVP) is well established, but uncertainties over the dry, water vapor, and liquid water absorption coefficients and the radiometric calibration can lead to errors in the retrieved LWP. A method in which additional information from a lidar ceilometer is used to identify the presence of liquid water clouds and their altitude is described. When such clouds are absent, the radiometric calibrations of the two frequencies are optimally adjusted so that the retrieved LWP is forced to zero; when they are present the calibrations are interpolated from the nearest clear-sky periods before and after, and the temperature of the cloud is used to refine the liquid water absorption coefficient ( with the temperature profile taken from a forecast model). This procedure is insensitive to the choice of absorption model, removes the troublesome negative values of LWP that can be retrieved, and provides more accurate values of low LWP in thin clouds. Analysis shows that LWP as low as 10 g m(-2) can be reliably retrieved, 90% of the time the error being less than 50%, and for LWP greater than 20 g m(-2) the error is less than 10%. An additional advantage is that the retrieval can tolerate uncertainties in the various absorption coefficients and is unaffected by slow drifts in brightness temperature errors of up to 5 K. Previous techniques have required that these temperatures be accurate to 0.5 K or better, which entails careful calibration and can be quite difficult to achieve.