Using Cloudsat and MLS Data to Study Convective Effects on the Upper Troposphere

Quantifying the influence of deep convection on the upper troposphere is essential for understanding (1) deposition of boundary-layer pollution into the upper troposphere where it (a) is easily transported long-ranges and can affect global air quality and (b) can affect ozone chemistry in the region where ozone has largest effect on climate, (2) climate feedback mechanisms involving cloud ice and water vapor, and (3) mass transport to the upper troposphere and its depiction in global circulation models. The combination of measurements from Cloudsat and from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on Aura provides an unprecedented opportunity to improve our knowledge of the influence of deep convection on the upper troposphere. This paper is an exploratory study of how MLS and CloudSat data might be used together for this purpose. MLS measurements of upper tropospheric cloud ice, water vapor, CO, and O3 provide identification of convective events that influence upper tropospheric composition, and observations of pollution detrained from the convection. Cloudsat provides the vertical and horizontal resolution needed for studying the convective processes, as well as cloud measurements to lower altitudes than MLS. Our study focuses on the 2006 Asian summer monsoon and analyzes the distributions of cloud ice, CO, and H2O from MLS and liquid/ice cloud distributions from CloudSat. Model simulations are compared with the observations and used to aid their interpretation.