Abstract. The Balloon Lidar Experiment (BOLIDE) was the first high-power lidar flown and operated successfully on board a balloon platform. As part of the PMC Turbo payload, the instrument acquired high-resolution backscatter profiles of polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) from an altitude of ∼ 38 km during its maiden ∼ 6 d flight from Esrange, Sweden, to northern Canada in July 2018. We describe the BOLIDE instrument and its development and report on the predicted and actual in-flight performance. Although the instrument suffered from excessively high background noise, we were able to detect PMCs with a volume backscatter coefficient as low as 0.6×10-10 m−1 sr−1 at a vertical resolution of 100 m and a time resolution of 30 s.

Abstract. The Balloon Lidar Experiment (BOLIDE) was the first high-power lidar flown and operated successfully onboard a balloon platform. As part of the PMC Turbo payload, the instrument acquired high resolution backscatter profiles of Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs) from an altitude of ∼38 km during its maiden ∼6 day flight from Esrange, Sweden, to Northern Canada in July 2018. We describe the BOLIDE instrument and its development and report on the predicted and actual in-flight performance. Although the instrument suffered from excessively high background noise, we were able to detect PMCs with a volume backscatter coefficient as low as 0.6 × 10−10 m−1 sr−1 at a vertical resolution of 100 m and a time resolution of 30 s.