LABORATORY WATER CLOUD SPECTRUM

A water cloud was produced in our laboratory cloud chamber, and the infrared optical depth shown in Fig. 1 was measured with a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR). We cooked-up an algorithm (rather than looked-up) that inverts the Fredholm Integral Equation to obtain particle size spectra from the measurement as shown in the second figure. The final figure is a measured water vapor spectrum at a course resolution of 32 inverse cm that is used to obtain the water vapor concentration.

Figure 1. Measured Optical Depth for laboratory water clouds. Model results are the broken curves.

Figure 2. Retrieved droplet size distribution (solid and broken curves) and directly measured size distribution (right axis and binned curve).

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