Modis level 3 daily cloud effective radius data

[vineeth]

Hi Admins/Forum members
I'm trying to use modis level 3 daily gridded data for Aerosol cloud interaction studies.

I want to use the "cloud-effective radius" parameter for single-level clouds for 3.7-micron wavelength. I found two parameters in the file, Cloud_Effective_Radius_1L_Liquid_Mean and Cloud_Effective_Radius_37_Liquid_Mean.

Cloud_Effective_Radius_1L_Liquid_Mean: I guess, It is the single-layer liquid cloud effective particle radius retrieved from Band 7 ( 2.1-micron wavelength ). Am I correct?

Cloud_Effective_Radius_37_Liquid_Mean: I assume this parameter is retrieved from Band 20 (3.7-micron wavelength) but include both single and multi-layer clouds. So how can I categorize single-layer clouds from this parameter?

Can anyone provide any suggestions
Any help is highly appreciated.

Thanks
Vineeth

[LAADSx_UserServices_M]

Dear Vineeth:
Here is a response from product SME:
"Their interpretation of those two datasets is correct. And unfortunately there is no way to categorize the 3.7-micron retrievals into single-layer/multi-layer populations using the level-3 files, they’d have to go back to the L2 files to separate those out and aggregate themselves. If I recall correctly, we made the decision not to include the 1L (single layer) aggregations for our non-standard spectral effective radius retrievals because of concerns about file size and number of datasets."