Cloud Occurrence Frequency at the Barrow, Alaska, ARM Climate Research Facility for 2008 Third Quarter 2009 ARM and Climate Change Prediction Program Metric Report

Clouds represent a critical component of the Earth’s atmospheric energy balance as a result of their interactions with solar and terrestrial radiation and a redistribution of heat through convective processes and latent heating. Despite their importance, clouds and the processes that control their development, evolution and lifecycle remain poorly understood. Consequently, the simulation of clouds and their associated feedbacks is a primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity. An important step in improving the representation of cloud process simulations is an improved high-resolution observational data set of the cloud systems including their time evolution. The first order quantity needed to understand the important role of clouds is the height of cloud occurrence and how it changes as a function of time. To this end, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facilities (ACRF) suite of instrumentation has been developed to make the observations required to improve the representation of cloud systems in atmospheric models