Combined lidar and radar cloud particle effective size retrievals made during CLARA

In principle, combined lidar and radar cloud soundings are capable of providing detailed height resolved information of the effective sizes of cloud particles. However, one of the obstacles to successfully using lidar and radar measurements to this end is the fact that it is difficult to account for the effects of attenuation, particularly with respect to the lidar signal. In this paper, a novel method for simultaneously determining cloud particle effective size profiles together with the lidar attenuation profile is presented. Simulations and the application to red data shows that this procedure appears to be quite robust even in cases where significant lidar attenuation is present. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.