The launch of the CloudSat cloud radar has provided some of the first near-global views of the threedimensional structure of clouds from space. To evaluate clouds in numerical models and compare them to the observations made by CloudSat, it is useful to have a tool that converts modeled clouds to radar returns that might be viewed by a radar system on a satellite passing over the model domain. QuickBeam is a user-friendly radar simulation package that performs this function and is freely available to the meteorological community. The workings of the simulator are briefly described and several applications of the simulator to numerical models are demonstrated.
Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington
Met Office, Hadley Centre for Climate Change, Exeter, United Kingdom
