Retrieval of aerosol backscatter and extinction from airborne coherent Doppler wind lidar measurements

Abstract

A novel method for calibration and quantitative aerosol optical properties retrieval from Doppler wind lidars (DWL) is presented in this work. Due to the strong wavelength dependence of the atmospheric molecular backscatter and the low sensitivity of the 5 coherent detection to spectrally broad signals, calibration methods for aerosol lidars cannot be applied to a coherent DWLs usually operating at wavelengths between 1.5–2 μm. Instead, concurrent measurements of an airborne DWL at 2 μm and the POLIS ground-based aerosol lidar at 532nm are used in this work, in combination with sun photometer measurements, for the calibration and retrieval of aerosol backscatter and extinction profiles.