Cloud growth process appeared in the global scale distribution of cloud optical and microphysical properties retrieved from the satellite remote sensing

The spatial distributions and temporal variations of the cloud properties, optical thickness (τ _c) and effective particle radius (r _e) are important observation targets to understand the role of clouds in the radiation budget estimations, especially in the cloud-aerosol interaction studies, because they will have information of cloud growth at the certain area. Thus, the wide-area and high-temporal observations of the cloud properties are necessary. We used MODIS 5-km sub-sampling radiance subsets (MOD02SSH) for the global scale retrievals of clouds. The MOD02SSH conserves scene texture and has moderately reduced data volume of 1/25 from original size of MODIS scene, so that they will be suitable for the more precise estimations of τ _c and r _eover synoptic to global scale. We retrieved τ _c and r _e from one-month MOD02SSH over the global region in July 2006 by using a cloud retrieval algorithm of CAPCOM developed by Nakajima and Nakajima (1995) with an extension by Kawamoto et al. (2001). In the obtained τ _c versus r _e scatter plots at every 5 × 5 degrees grid boxes, we found typical features of the τ _c versus r _e scatter patterns in the middle part of the Pacific and Indian oceans, Eastern Europe and Asia, and the west coast of the North and South America. Such patterns will be explained by the spectral microphysics cloud model developed by Suzuki et al. (2006), as the cloud properties under the pristine, turbid, and mixture aerosol environments. The aerosol transport model SPRINTARS developed by Takemura et al. (2005) simulated that the Eastern Europe and Asia covered by dense aerosols in the period.