Fig. 1. International and domestic cloud observing satellite missions. (a) Seventeen Chinese self-developed FengYun (FY) meteorological satellites; (b) atmospheric scientific observation satellite constellation program named A-Train

Fig. 2. Production process of cloud products for satellite

Fig. 3. Examples of cloud micro-optics and microphysics inversion principles and results^{[47, 106]}. (a) Ture color image of cloud in MODIS C6 version; (b) cloud top pressure; (c) cloud optical thickness; (d) cloud particle effective radius; (e) schematic diagram of retrieving cloud top pressure and cloud effective radius from two bands. Different cloud top reflectance values of different cloud optical thickness (dashed line) and effective radius (solid line) of ice cloud at wavelengths of 0.64 μm and 2.20 μm under fixed solar zenith angle, satellite zenith angle and relative azimuth

Fig. 4. Principle of cloud droplet spectra retrieval from polarized measurements and global cloud droplet effective radius derived from POLDER^[107-108]. (a) Polarization phase function varying with cloud droplet effective radius; (b) polarization phase function varying with wavelength; (c) polarization phase function varying with effective variance; (d) global cloud droplet effective radius derived from POLDER