The Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers - Florida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL-FACE) is a focused mission of modeling, observations and integrated analyses designed to investigate tropical cirrus cloud systems and their roles in both regional and global climates. Satellite observations will be utilized in mission planning to provide coincident data to assist the development of global retrieval of cirrus cloud cover.

The largest gaps in understanding of global cirrus effects on climate involve tropical cirrus systems. High level clouds dominate the cloud radiative forcing signal in the tropics. Tropical cirrus systems usually originate from water transport in deep convective cloud clusters. However, a wide range of upper level cloud types may result from such convection. These include thick precipitating anvil cloud directly tied to the convective cells, moderately thick non-precipitating anvils, and the thin cirrus that are a fairly ubiquitous feature of the tropics. In addition, in situ observations of cross tropopause transports will provide improved understanding of global chemical transport and the impact of the tropics on the global distribution of chemicals and aerosols in the troposphere and upper stratosphere.

Three issues provide the context for CRYSTAL-FACE:

• It is essential to gain improved knowledge of the global water ice and water vapor fields in the upper troposphere in relationship to the associated global radiative fields and on scales adequate to resolve the dominant physical processes ultimately responsible for the occurrence, e.g., storm and cloud systems.
• An improved knowledge and understanding of upper tropospheric cloud generation, re-generation, and dissipation mechanisms are critical to formulation and verification of methods to realisticially capture these processes in regional and large scale climate models.
• The impact of cirrus in the tropics on the global distribution of water vapor, particularly cross-tropopause mixing, is a key to understanding global chemical and aerosol transports.

After numerous requests for the combined CPL-CRS data, as was generated for the JGR publication "Combined lidar-radar remote sensing: Initial results from CRYSTAL-FACE" [(download PDF file)], that data is now available for downloading.

Click here to go to the lidar-radar page.