CloudSat mission: Performance and early science after the first year of operation

This paper reports on the early mission performance of the radar and other major aspects of the CloudSat mission. The Cloudsat cloud profiling radar (CPR) has been operating since 2 June 2006 and has proven to be remarkably stable since turn‐on. A number of products have been developed using these space‐borne radar data as principal inputs. Combined with other A‐Train sensor data, these new observations offer unique, global views of the vertical structure of clouds and precipitation jointly. Approximately 11% of clouds detected over the global oceans produce precipitation that, in all likelihood, reaches the surface. Warm precipitating clouds are both wetter and composed of larger particles than…

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  National Aeronautics and Space Administration