Bibcode
Merino, Andrés; López, Laura; Sánchez, José Luis; Rodriguez-Frias, Maria Dolores; Del Peral, Luis; Franchini, Sebastian; Licandro, J.; García-Ortega, Eduardo; Marcos, José Luis; Gascón, Estíbaliz; Fernández-González, Sergio; Hermida, Lucía; Rodriguez, Elena
Bibliographical reference
EGU General Assembly 2015, held 12-17 April, 2015 in Vienna, Austria. id.11193
Advertised on:
4
2015
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
The objective of the Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO) program
is detection and measurement of high-energy particles that reach earth's
atmosphere from space. Clouds at mid and upper levels of the troposphere
can interfere with such detection. Therefore, determining cloud top
height with high accuracy is crucial to estimating the effect of clouds
on these measurements. With this aim, we developed a method to extract
that height using cloud temperature via vertical profiles predicted by
the WRF model. First, we evaluated model ability to represent
temperature and humidity profiles in different climatic regions of the
globe. To this end, we established 12 windows covering the earth and all
seasons of the year. From these, points with available soundings were
selected to calibrate and obtain the optimal WRF configuration for
producing vertical temperature profiles. Within the WRF, we defined two
domains for each window, with spatial resolutions 15 and 5 km. Vertical
resolution was established with 58 levels, because we required profiles
of high accuracy. In each study window, we evaluated a series of
parameterizations (microphysics, cumulus, radiation). For this, we
compared vertical profiles obtained by the WRF for each
parameterization, using sounding data in each study area. Once we
obtained the optimum physical configuration of the model for each
climatic region, we developed an application to automatically determine
cloud top height at each pixel of the infrared camera images, taking as
input cloud-top temperature plus temperature and humidity profiles
output by the WRF at each pixel.