Exploiting ABI/GOES multiband observations for ice cloud property retrievals

The spatiotemporal variation of ice cloud optical and microphysical properties causes a significant gap in understanding the regional and global ice cloud radiative effect. In particular, polar-orbiting satellite observations have coarse temporal resolutions (e.g., twice a day), which cannot measure the diurnal variation of ice cloud properties. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard the NOAA GOES 16/17 geostationary satellites provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore the temporal variation of ice cloud properties. ABI measures outgoing irradiance in 16 channels covering visible (VIS), near-infrared (NIR), and thermal infrared (TIR) wavelengths. This study examines the performance of ice cloud property retrievals with several combinations of ABI channels based on synthetic simulations. In particular, we will focus on the difference of retrieval performances among the classical VIS-NIR reflectance method, TIR split-window methods, and a combination of VIS-NIR-TIR channel measurements, to illustrate the benefit to the reduction of uncertainty in ice cloud property retrievals by making full use of ABI channels.