RSP Data Status, Updates and Plans from the Team
•All radiance (L1C), aerosol and cloud (L2) products are in the archive. •Revised calibration performed at GSFC in July 2021 applied to reprocessing. •Clouds have smaller drops and higher optical depths (larger droplet number concentrations) in winter than in summer. Cloud top droplet size distributions tend to be narrow with roughly 80% having an effective variance of less than 0.07. This is relevant to how well bulk auto-conversion parameterizations are likely to work at cloud top (order of magnitude effects) and also to assumptions used in the remote sensing of droplet number (~ 10% effect). Real refractive index and effective radius retrievals are consistent with hygroscopic growth of aerosols Real refractive index and effective variance retrievals imply the presence of an insoluble fraction of aerosols Future work on clouds will look at differences in cloud top drizzle formation and auto-conversion rates between the different campaigns and at how well mixed phase clouds can be detected (if at all) from sensors such as VIIRS and PACE OCI.