Airborne compact rotational Raman lidar for temperature measurement

Abstract

We developed an airborne compact rotational Raman lidar (CRL) for use on the University of Wyoming King Air (UWKA) aircraft to obtain two-dimensional (2D) temperature disman tributions. It obtained fine-scale 2D temperature distributions within 3 km below the aircraft for the first time during the PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection At Night) campaign in 2015. The CRL provided nighttime temperature measurements with a random error of <0.5 K within 800 m below aircraft at 45 m vertical and 1000 m horizontal resolution. The temperatures obtained by the CRL and a radiosonde agreed. Along with water vapor and aerosol measurements, the CRL provides critical parameters on the state of the lower atmosphere for a wide range of atmospheric research.

Interactions between a Nocturnal MCS and the Stable Boundary Layer as Observed by an Airborne Compact Raman Lidar during PECAN

“…The UWKA carried an array of in situ probes and the compact Raman lidar (CRL), which directly measures 2D (along-track, vertical) water vapor, aerosol, and temperature variations at small scales (;300 m horizontal and ;100 m vertical) within the lower troposphere (Wang et al 2016a,b;Wu et al 2016). The UWKA served as the only lower-tropospheric aircraft to document the MCS environment during PECAN.…”

“…The CRL can provide accurate retrieval data of water vapor mixing ratio (WVMR), lidar scattering ratio (LSR), and temperature in the BL at night (Liu et al 2014;Wu et al 2016). The LSR is a normalized parameter of total backscattering to molecular backscattering, in which the minimum value (1.0) represents scattering only by air molecular and larger value (.1.0) represent more aerosol backscattering.…”

“…The CRL has four channels that were initially developed to obtain 2D distributions of water vapor and aerosol in 2010 (Liu et al 2014). Additional channels were added to the receiver box in the CRL to measure temperature in early 2015 (Wu et al 2016). In total, there are five channels in the lidar receiver box including N 2 and H 2 O vibrational-rotational Raman channels for water vapor measurements, low-J and high-J pure rotational Raman channels for temperature measurements (J is the rotational Quantum number), and an elastic and N 2 channel for aerosol measurements.…”

Challenges and Opportunities in Lidar Remote Sensing

“…Now micropulse type lidars are available for routine aerosol and water vapor measurements (Welton et al, 2001). Compact Raman lidars were demonstrated for airborne and groundbased operations (Wu et al, 2016;Lange et al, 2019). However, we still need to overcome many issues .…”

Implementation of UV rotational Raman channel to improve aerosol retrievals from multiwavelength lidar

“…RR measurements have already been used for lidar applications, very often to obtain temperature profiles, e.g. [13][14][15][16][17][18]. However, when the aim of the lidar measurements is to retrieve and profiles, the temperature dependence of RR lines becomes an issue.…”