Based on the 1 min backscatter ratio R profiles from the all-day lidar measurements in Wuhan, China (30.5°N, 114.4°E), hourly convective boundary layer (CBL) height was calculated with the variance method. The calculated CBL height sequence displays the regular diurnal cycle of the CBL top. The prevalent mixing process within the CBL is also revealed. During the CBL growth period, the backscatter ratio R falls visibly with increasing altitude and has large variance within the CBL, suggesting that more abundant aerosol particles from lower altitudes are being transported upward and being mixed with the local background or advected aerosol layers. During the CBL quasistationary period, R tends to be vertically uniform, and its variance reaches a daytime minimum within the CBL, indicating that the vertical homogenization of aerosol particles produced by the convectively driven mixing reaches its maximum. During the afternoon and early evening transition period, the vertical uniformity of R weakens and the variance enlarges again, implying that the reduced convectively driven mixing fails to maintain a high vertical homogeneity. When the 1 min R profiles were plotted together in terms of each 1 h interval, the fluctuating R curves at heights around the CBL top looked like a "node", representing the structure of the entrainment zone between the CBL and the free troposphere. The moving node depicts the evolution of the entrainment zone. The diurnal variation of the CBL height shows an obvious seasonal dependence which coincides with the annual variation of the local surface temperature. The surface fine particle concentration generally has a more complex diurnal cycle than that expected from the CBL-dilution/CBL-accumulation effect. But, it shows a strong annual variation which is out of phase with respect to that of the monthly mean maximum CBL height. This tends to suggest that the seasonal behavior of the surface fine particle concentration mainly depends on the seasonal variation in available volume (determined by the CBL height) for aerosol dispersion.

A transient digitizer (Licel) connecting to a photomultiplier tube (PMT) can obtain lidar backscatter profiles in both photon count and analog signal. A lidar can detect higher atmospheric regions by combining (gluing) simultaneous analog and photon count data via the slope coefficient. In this work, the output of a PMT has been measured with a transient digitizer based on an intensity-stable light source. The slope value and dynamic range of the lidar profile have been characterized. The slope value is determined only by the gain of the PMT as it works in a linear range with a fixed pulse height discrimination threshold. The dynamic range of a glued lidar profile is settled by the slope value. The fitted slope has a more exact value when the selection criterion is given in terms of the independent variable for fitting. For practical lidar data, the fitted slope is more stable and reliable when the lower limit of the data range for fitting rises.

In this paper, a new method is proposed to analyze the broadband electromagnetic characteristics of electrically large targets by combining the precorrected-FFT algorithm (P-FFT) with the near-field matrix interpolation technique. The proposed method uses the precorrected-FFT algorithm to reduce the storage and accelerate the matrix vector product of the far field. In order to make the precorrected-FFT algorithm can calculate the broadband characteristics of electrically large targets more quickly, the matrix interpolation method is used to interpolate the near-field matrix of the precorrected-FFT algorithm to improve the efficiency of calculation. The numerical results obtained validate the proposed method and its implementation in terms of accuracy and runtime performance.

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