Remote sensing of aerosol, cloud properties & precipitation

In this presentation, Professor Li gives a brief overview of their methods and applications.

He explained: "Global remote sensing of aerosol and cloud properties plays an important role in weather, climate and environmental studies. After decades of Research and Development, we are able to retrieve most of the variables concerning aerosol and cloud optical depth and their sizes, cloud liquid water path (LWP), cloud phase, and precipitation.

"Nevertheless, we are still confronted with some technical challenges in retrieving some of the variables for certain aerosol and clouds, especially using passive sensors alone. For aerosol retrieval — we have to make a lot of assumptions concerning aerosol optical properties, surface reflection, etc. For cloud retrieval — it is usually limited to single-layer mono-phase clouds, and the vertical profiles of clouds are often assumed as single-layers. For remote sensing of rainfall — we have been most successful for cold-rain, but have had little luck with warm rain from low clouds. Our team has pursued a series of studies to tackle some of the problems."

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