IceCloudNet is a novel method based on machine learning able to obtain high quality vertically resolved predictions for ice water content and ice crystal number concentration of clouds containing ice. The predictions come at the spatio-temporal coverage and resolution of Meteosat SEVIRI and the vertical resolution of DARDAR. IceCloudNet consists of a ConvNeXt-based U-Net and a 3D PatchGAN discriminator model and is trained by predicting DARDAR profiles from co-located SEVIRI images. Despite the sparse availability of DARDAR data due to its narrow overpass, IceCloudNet is able to predict cloud occurrence, macrophysical shape, and microphysical properties with high precision.

We release 5 years of vertically resolved ice water content (IWC) and ice crystal number concentration (Nice) of clouds containing ice with a 3 km×3 km×240 m×15 minute resolution on a spatial domain of 30°W to 30°E and 30°S to 30°N. The resulting data set increases the availability of vertical cloud profiles for the period when DARDAR is available by more than six orders of magnitude and moreover, is able to provide vertical cloud profiles beyond the lifetime of the recently ended satellite missions underlying DARDAR.