Exploring the Turbulent Urban Boundary by Use of Lidars and Microwave Radiometers

Abstract

A Doppler lidar has been developed using fiber optic based technologies and advanced signal processing techniques. Although this system has been operated in a scanning mode in the past, for this application, the system is operated in a vertically pointing mode and delivers a time series of vertical velocity profiles. By cooperating the Doppler lidar with other instruments, including a back scatter lidar, and a microwave radiometer, models of atmospheric stability can be tested, opening up an exciting path for researchers, applied scientists and engineers to discover unique phenomena related to fundamental atmospheric science processes. A consistent set of retrievals between each of these instruments emphasizes the utility for such a network of instruments to better characterize the turbulent atmospheric urban boundary layers which is expected to offer a useful capability for assessing and improving models that are in great need of such ground truth.

Application of Lidar and other profiling techniques to study the impact that Severe weather hazards have on the New York City built environment

“…1 as well as other atmospheric boundary layer instruments and studies including the construction and evaluation of the Coherent Doppler Lidar (CDL) [1][2][3][4]. In addition, a number of previous reports incorporate these instruments (including additional instrumentation) to study the dynamics of the urban atmospheric boundary layer in the NYC metropolitan region with applications to air quality [5,6], wind hazards [7], turbulent boundary layer and stability studies [8][9][10][11].…”