Abstract. Ground-based remote sensing observatories have a crucial role to play in providing data to improve our understanding of atmospheric processes, to test the performance of atmospheric models, and to develop new methods for future space-borne observations. Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, a French research institute in environmental sciences, created the Site Instrumental de Recherche par Télédétection Atmosphérique (SIRTA), an atmospheric observatory with these goals in mind. Today SIRTA, located 20 km south of Paris, operates a suite a state-of-the-art active and passive remote sensing instruments dedicated to routine monitoring of cloud and aerosol properties, and key atmospheric parameters. Detailed description of the state of the atmospheric column is progressively archived and made accessible to the scientific community. This paper describes the SIRTA infrastructure and database, and provides an overview of the scientific research associated with the observatory. Researchers using SIRTA data conduct research on atmospheric processes involving complex interactions between clouds, aerosols and radiative and dynamic processes in the atmospheric column. Atmospheric modellers working with SIRTA observations develop new methods to test their models and innovative analyses to improve parametric representations of sub-grid processes that must be accounted for in the model. SIRTA provides the means to develop data interpretation tools for future active remote sensing missions in space (e.g. CloudSatCorrespondence to: M. Haeffelin (martial.haeffelin@lmd.polytechnique.fr) and CALIPSO). SIRTA observation and research activities take place in networks of atmospheric observatories that allow scientists to access consistent data sets from diverse regions on the globe.

The spaceborne lidar CALIPSO (Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) directly measures atmospheric opacity. In 8 years of CALIPSO observations, we find that 69% of vertical profiles penetrate through the complete atmosphere. The remaining 31% do not reach the surface, due to opaque clouds. The global mean altitude of full attenuation of the lidar beam (z_opaque) is 3.2 km, but there are large regional variations in this altitude. Of relevance to cloud‐climate studies, the annual zonal mean longwave cloud radiative effect and annual zonal mean z_opaque weighted by opaque cloud cover are highly correlated (0.94). The annual zonal mean shortwave cloud radiative effect and annual zonal mean opaque cloud cover are also correlated (−0.95). The new diagnostics introduced here are implemented within a simulator framework to enable scale‐aware and definition‐aware evaluation of the LMDZ5B global climate model. The evaluation shows that the model overestimates opaque cloud cover (31% obs. versus 38% model) and z_opaque (3.2 km obs. versus 5.1 km model). In contrast, the model underestimates thin cloud cover (35% obs. versus 14% model). Further assessment shows that reasonable agreement between modeled and observed longwave cloud radiative effects results from compensating errors between insufficient warming by thin clouds and excessive warming due to overestimating both z_opaque and opaque cloud cover. This work shows the power of spaceborne lidar observations to directly constrain cloud‐radiation interactions in both observations and models.

Abstract. We document, for the first time, how detailed vertical profiles of cloud fraction (CF) change diurnally between 51∘ S and 51∘ N, by taking advantage of 15 months of measurements from the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) lidar on the non-sun-synchronous International Space Station (ISS). Over the tropical ocean in summer, we find few high clouds during daytime. At night they become frequent over a large altitude range (11–16 km between 22:00 and 04:00 LT). Over the summer tropical continents, but not over ocean, CATS observations reveal mid-level clouds (4–8 km above sea level or a.s.l.) persisting all day long, with a weak diurnal cycle (minimum at noon). Over the Southern Ocean, diurnal cycles appear for the omnipresent low-level clouds (minimum between noon and 15:00) and high-altitude clouds (minimum between 08:00 and 14:00). Both cycles are time shifted, with high-altitude clouds following the changes in low-altitude clouds by several hours. Over all continents at all latitudes during summer, the low-level clouds develop upwards and reach a maximum occurrence at about 2.5 km a.s.l. in the early afternoon (around 14:00). Our work also shows that (1) the diurnal cycles of vertical profiles derived from CATS are consistent with those from ground-based active sensors on a local scale, (2) the cloud profiles derived from CATS measurements at local times of 01:30 and 13:30 are consistent with those observed from CALIPSO at similar times, and (3) the diurnal cycles of low and high cloud amounts (CAs) derived from CATS are in general in phase with those derived from geostationary imagery but less pronounced. Finally, the diurnal variability of cloud profiles revealed by CATS strongly suggests that CALIPSO measurements at 01:30 and 13:30 document the daily extremes of the cloud fraction profiles over ocean and are more representative of daily averages over land, except at altitudes above 10 km where they capture part of the diurnal variability. These findings are applicable to other instruments with local overpass times similar to CALIPSO's, such as all the other A-Train instruments and the future EarthCARE mission.