Ground-based radars insight into warm marine boundary layer clouds for shaping future spaceborne radar missions

This study relies on ground-based observations to quantify the limitations of current spaceborne radars when it comes to capturing the coverage and vertical structure of Warm Marine Boundary Layer (WMBL) clouds. Its finding that neither the CloudSat-Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) nor the EarthCARE-CPR will be able to accurately characterize cloud cover, cloud fraction and the location of a large fraction of WMBL clouds further encourages the development of concepts for new spaceborne radar systems targeting WMBL clouds. Given the properties of WMBL clouds extracted from ground-based radar measurements collected in the eastern northern Atlantic, we recommend that the next generation of space-borne radars targeting WMBL science shall operate interlaced pulse modes including both a highly sensitive long-pulse and a less sensitive but clutter limiting short-pulse mode. The findings of this study are particularly relevant for shaping the Aerosol and Cloud, Convection and Precipitation (ACCP) mission currently under investigation at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).