SMILES ice cloud products

Upper tropospheric water vapor and clouds play an important role in Earth’s climate, but knowledge of them, in particular diurnal variation in deep convective clouds, is limited. An essential variable to understand them is cloud ice water content. The Japanese Superconducting Submillimeter-Wave Limb-Emission Sounder (SMILES) on board the International Space Station (ISS) samples the atmosphere at different local times allowing the study of diurnal variability of atmospheric parameters. We describe a new ice cloud data set consisting of partial Ice Water Path and Ice Water Content. Preliminary comparisons with EOS-MLS, CloudSat-CPR and CALIOP-CALIPSO are presented. Then, the diurnal variation over land and over open ocean for partial ice water path is reported. Over land, a pronounced diurnal variation peaking strongly in the afternoon/early evening was found. Over the open ocean, little temporal dependence was encountered. This data set is publicly available for download in HDF5 format.