نبذة مختصرة : International audience ; Abstract. Structural patterns of cloud effective radius (ER) and liquid water content (LWC) profiles are essential variables of cloud lifecycle and precipitation processes, while observing cloud profiles from passive remote-sensing sensors remains highly challenging. Understanding whether there are typical structural patterns of ER and LWC profiles in liquid clouds and how they are linked to cloud entrainment or precipitating status is critical in developing algorithms to derive cloud profiles from passive satellite sensors. This study aims to address these questions and provide a preliminary foundation for the development of liquid cloud profile retrievals for the Multi-viewing, Multi-channel and Multi-polarizationImaging (3MI) sensor aboard the European Organization for the Exploitationof Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) Polar System-Second Generation(EPS-SG) satellite, which is scheduled to be launched in 2025. Firstly, wesimulate a large ensemble of stratocumulus cloud profiles using the Colorado State University (CSU) Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). The empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis is adopted to describe the shape of simulated profiles with a limited number of elemental profile variations. Our results indicate that the first three EOFs of LWC and ER profiles can explain >90 % of LWC and ER profiles. The profiles are divided into four prominent patterns and all of thesepatterns can be simplified as triangle-shaped polylines. The frequency ofthese four patterns is found to relate to intensities of the cloud-topentrainment and precipitation. Based on these analyses, we propose asimplified triangle-shaped cloud profile parameterization scheme allowing us to represent these main patterns of LWC and ER. This simple yet physically realistic analytical model of cloud profiles is expected to facilitate the representation of cloud properties in advanced retrieval algorithms such as those developed for the 3MI/EPS-SG.
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