The planetary boundary layer height (PBLH) is an essential parameter for weather forecasting and climate modeling. The primary methods for obtaining the PBLH include radiosonde measurements of atmospheric parameters and lidar measurements, which track aerosol layers in the lower atmosphere. Radiosondes provide the parameters to determine the PBLH but cannot monitor changes over a diurnal cycle. Lidar instruments can track the temporal variability of the PBLH and account for spatial variability when operated in a network configuration. The networkable micropulse DIAL (MPD) instruments for thermodynamic profiling are based on diode-laser technology that is eye-safe and cost-effective and has demonstrated long-term autonomous operation. We present a retrieval algorithm for determining the PBLH from the quantitative aerosol profiling capability of the high spectral resolution channel of the MPD. The PBLH is determined using a Haar wavelet transform (HWT) method that tracks aerosol layers in the lower atmosphere. The PBLH from the lidar is compared with the PBLH determined from potential temperature profiles from radiosondes. In many cases, good agreement among the PBLH retrievals was seen. However, the radiosonde retrieval often missed the lowest inversion layer when several layers were present, while the HWT could track the lowest layer.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2024
Field Testing of a Diode-Laser-Based MicroPulse Differential Absorption Lidar System to Measure Atmospheric Thermodynamic Variables
Traditionally, quantitative lidar techniques like differential absorption lidar (DIAL) and high-spectral-resolution lidar (HSRL) utilize high-power-aperture product designs, which partially compensates for the need to take discrete deriva-tives of noisy data in post-processing (for number density for DIAL and extinction for HSRL) and provides for high-performance measurements, i.e., higher resolu-tion, accuracy, or precision. Conversely, low-power-aperture product lidar designs are easier to make eye-safe, reliable, and cost-effective, which are important attributes for network development and field deployment. The atmospheric science community has expressed the need for high-quality, quantitative, robust, network deployable, and cost-effective sensors for a variety of applications such as improved numerical weather forecasting – in essence requiring the best of both worlds without the accompanying drawbacks. In response to this need, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Montana State University have been developing the MicroPulse DIAL (MPD) architecture for thermodynamic profiling in the lower atmosphere. The MPD architecture takes advantage of the benefits of low-power, low-cost laser diodes, and fiber optics to achieve quantitative profiling leverag-ing narrowband filtering and efficient elastic scattering. A field-deployable MPD instrument capable of humidity, quantitative aerosol, and temperature profiling has recently been developed. This presentation will describe the current status of this thermodynamic profiler and the initial results from a recent field deployment. Emphasis will be given to the analysis of the temperature data including compar-isons to co-located radiosondes to describe current performance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917851
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10484387
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Atmospheric Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 30th International Laser Radar Conference
- ISSN:
- 2194-5217
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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