Tropical echo-top height for precipitating clouds observed by multiple active instruments aboard satellites

•The standard for precipitating clouds observed by PR and CPR is proposed.•Regional differences occur in the underestimation of precipitating-cloud-top height by PR.•This underestimation leads to an underestimation of the radiative forcing.•PR-echo-top height should not be used as cloud-top height before corrections.

The echo-top height observed by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation radar (PR) has been used by some studies as an approximate calculation of the precipitating-cloud-top height to simulate radiative forcing or to identify overshooting convection. However, due to the low sensitivity (~ 17 dBZ) of PR, the PR-echo-top height is lower than the actual precipitating-cloud-top height. Here, the echo-top heights of the tropical precipitating cloud detected by PR, the Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR), and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) were investigated to evaluate the underestimation of the PR-echo-top height to the actual precipitating-cloud-top height. The results show that there were significant spatial variations in the underestimates of precipitating-cloud-top height by PR. The model simulation showed that these underestimates led to an underestimation of the radiative forcing of the Earth system, the relative error of which was ~ 10% with 1-km underestimation and ~ 20% to 80% with 7-km underestimation when the cloud optical thickness was fixed to 10. Therefore, the underestimates of precipitating-cloud-top height by PR should be taken into consideration when using PR-echo-top height.