Development and Application of an airborne Differential Absorption Lidar for the Simultaneous Measurement of Ozone and Water Vapor in the Tropopause Region

Kurzfassung

A new, combined, lidar system has been developed that is able to simultaneously measure profiles of ozone and water vapor onboard of a comparatively small aircraft. The concurrent measurement of these complementary trace species in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere allows inferring exchange processes in the tropopause region. Whereas an advanced H2O differential absorption lidar at 935 nm has successfully been developed and extensively tested at DLR in the past, we concentrate here on amending this lidar by addition of a UV channel to measure ozone. The transmitter of the ozone DIAL is based on a near-IR optical parametric oscillator that is frequency-converted into the UV spectral range by intracavity sum frequency mixing. Hereby, a continuous UV tuning range of ~ 302-316 nm has been achieved. The average output power in this range is higher than 1 W corresponding to more than 10 mJ per pulse at a repetition rate of 100 Hz. While airborne measurements are still pending, ground-based validation using both ozone sondes and ozone DIAL has successfully been performed and demonstrates the potential of this system.