One of the profound scientific problems in the climate sciences is about building a realistic climate modeling (on computers) capability of clouds. If we can’t do this right, we can’t improve our future predictions of climate all that much. NASA makes an incredibly wide variety of ongoing measurements of clouds, temperature and humidity on a global basis from satellites. These measurements make it possible to observe what we should calculate in the climate forecasting models.

However, it is often really difficult to make sense of these measurements: when are they any good, what do they measure, what do they not measure, how precise are the measurements, are there phenomena that are measured but haven’t been thought about yet, etc. If one wants to put together a picture of clouds, water vapor, and temperature into a coherent story that a modeler can use, one has to consider all of these problems, and more.

I’m trying this with CloudSat, which measures clouds, and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, which measures temperature and humidity. Fortunately, they measure the same part of Earth’s atmosphere at the same time. Unfortunately, there is much that we don’t understand about the measurements themselves, which makes progress slow on developing a coherent story. But its steady and we are making headway…