Comparison of 20 million airborne lidar optical profiles to anything else

During a twelve day field test west of the continental shelf off the coast of Washington state, we conducted multiple environmental data collection flights in a 150 km by 150 km area. We operated a scanning lidar system optimized for ocean profiling collecting near surface atmospheric return signal, surface reflections and optical profiles to several optical depths. The along and across track spatial resolution was approximately 10 meters and the vertical resolution was approximately 0.1 meters. We also deployed ten single use temperature profiling buoys during the test. We will present comparisons of the spatial-temporal lidar data to the buoy data and other public source data, such as satellite derived k-diffuse and Argo float data. It is our expectation that the lidar data will reveal complex and changing vertical optical structures on sub-kilometer horizontal scales that are not adequately captured by other ocean sensing techniques.