A continental middle and high cloud project for FIRE

摘要

The final report for the five years of this grant during which the University of Wisconsin-Madison participated in NASA First International Cloud Climatology Project's Regional Experiment (FIRE) is presented. FIRE studied cloud forms that are important to the earth's radiation budget and also are hard to produce in numerical models. The impetus of this program was the need to forecast climate changes in view of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. The effects of CO2 increases could easily be magnified or suppressed by as little as a 3 percent change in global cloud cover. FIRE sought to gain the data and knowledge to enable numerical models of climate to correctly produce clouds and their effects on radiation for the simulation of climatic changes. FIRE was a subset of the International Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) which is producing a global cloud climatology from satellite data. FIRE augmented ISCCP by providing data on how clouds affect radiative transfer through the atmosphere so that heat budget inferences could be made from the ISCCP data. FIRE also sought information on how clouds develop and dissipate in the atmosphere to enable numerical modelers to develop methods of producing clouds in their models. The goals of FIRE were very ambitious. Data were collected from two field experiments and from long term monitoring sites. These data are currently being analyzed. The Principal Investigators participation in FIRE and the progress toward collecting the scientific goals of the experiment are described.