Variance scaling and moist conserved variables from AIRS/CloudSat and comparisons to ECMWF

The simultaneous vertical profiling of cloud condensate, temperature and water vapor from simultaneous A-train instruments are expected to be useful for evaluating and improving subgrid-scale climate model cloud parameterizations and thus their realism. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is used to obtain a climatology of height-resolved variance scaling of tropospheric temperature and water vapor. The magnitudes and gradients of temperature and water vapor-derived power law exponents have large but opposite latitudinal dependences in the tropics and extratropics, two large-scale regions dominated by convective and baroclinic processes, respectively. The exponents are not only consistent to previous aircraft campaigns, numerical modeling, and theoretical studies, but they also provide a highly detailed and global view not obtained from previous observational investigations. This methodology has been extended to the ECMWF analysis and forecast fields during YOTC, where similarities and differences to AIRS exponents are highlighted. Furthermore, we will discuss progress on using temperature and water vapor derived from AIRS, combined with cloud condensate obtained from the 94GHz CloudSat radar, to derive moist conserved variables that are not obtainable from individual satellite sensors.