Rayleigh lidar temperature measurements in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere

Abstract

A single-wavelength Rayleigh lidar system has been used to measure the temperatures in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere in the night in the altitude range from about 8 to 30 km. The temperature derivation is based on an inversion algorithm of the pure Rayleigh backscatter. Calculations include the derivation of the air molecular concentration by an iterative method and the backscattered signals corrected by the background aerosol, which is now found to be low and stable. The uncertainties in estimating the temperature using this method are discussed in detail.The temperature profiles and the tropopause characteristics derived by using the lidar measurements are compared with the radiosonde data. Good agreement is found between these two measurements revealing the potential of this method. The comparison with radiosonde data shows that the lidar measured tropopause temperature is lower by 0.8±1.5 K and the tropopause height is higher by 0.45±0.8 km than the radiosonde measurements. The climatology of local tropopause (24.57°N,121.13°E) is briefly discussed in terms of a double tropopause formation and seasonal variations of the tropopause height and temperature. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.