Implementation of synergetic observations by terrestrial and space lidar systems and sun-radiometer for study of large scale aerosol changes

Abstract

The method of combined lidar and radiometer sounding (LRS) became a specialized tool for measuring altitude distributions of aerosol optical parameters and aerosol mode concentrations. The work gives description of advanced version of LRS technique, which integrates data of ground-based multiwavelength lidar systems, as well as satellite lidars like CALIOP, with data of AERONET radiometer stations for monitoring aerosol mode concentration profiles to study the atmospheric process over the area of large regions, or the Earth's atmosphere as a whole. Lidar and Radiometer Inversion Cod (LIRIC) is used as a base software package for processing data of terrestrial and satellite lidar observation because of high stability of its sequential inversion procedure for processing combined radiometer and lidar data. Special software module was developed to extract the ensemble of individual CALIOP profiles of attenuated backscatters in the vicinity of AERONET sites from CALIPSO Lidar L1B Profile Data. A number of collocated measurements by means of AERONET radiometer, ground-based lidar and CALIOP were carried out to validate the results of the extended LRS technique. Altitude profiles of aerosol mode concentrations retrieved from ground-based and satellite lidar data are compared to estimate differences between two types of LRSmeasurements. Advanced terrestrial and satellite LRS technique was used to obtain the “snapshot” of aerosol concentration profiles over the world in the frame of international “Lidar and Radiometer measurement campaign - 2017" (LRMC-2017). Thirty nine combined lidar and radiometer stations in Eurasian and South American continents participated in terrestrial part of the campaign.