14.2 RETRIEVAL OF CLOUD GEOMETRICAL PROPERTIES USING ADEOS-II/GLI

Clouds play a crucial role in the climate system. The investigation of their radiative properties on the cloud optical, microphysical, and geometrical characteristics is of great interest. Here, top height, base height, and geometrical thickness of cloud layer are considered as cloud geometrical properties. Several studies show that information of some spectral regions including oxygen A-band, enables us to retrieve the cloud geometrical properties as well as the optical thickness and the effective particle radius of cloud. In this study, an algorithm is presented to retrieve simultaneously the cloud optical thickness, effective particle radius, top height, and geometrical thickness of cloud layer with the spectral information of visible, near infrared, thermal infrared, and oxygen A-band channels. This algorithm was applied to ADEOS-II / GLI dataset so as to retrieve global distribution of cloud geometrical properties. The retrieved results around Japan are validated with in situ observations. The retrieved and in-situ observed values are comparable in order of magnitude, but it is necessary to investigate the results in detail to improve the algorithm. This study will expand to the global analysis and is anticipated to contribute to the earth climate studies in terms of cloud optical, microphysical, and geometrical properties