Determination of Planetary Boundary Layer height with Lidar Signals Using Maximum Limited Height Initialization and Range Restriction (MLHI-RR)

Abstract

The planetary boundary layer height (PBLH) is a vital parameter to characterize the surface convection, which determines the diffusion of air pollutants. The accurate inversion of PBLH is extremely important for the study of aerosol concentrations, in order to predict air quality and provide weather forecast. Aerosol lidar, a powerful remote sensing instrument for detecting the characteristics of atmospheric temporal and spatial evolution, can continuously retrieve the planetary boundary layer (PBL) and obtain high resolution measurements. However, multi-layer conditions, including one or more layers of aerosol, or cloud above the PBL, can seriously interfere the accuracy of PBLH determined by lidar. A new technique of maximum limited height initialization and range restriction (MLHI-RR) is proposed to eliminate the impact of multi-layer conditions on PBLH determination. Four widely used methods for deriving PBLH are utilized, in addition to the MLHI-RR constraint. Comparisons demonstrate that the proposed technique can determine the PBLH in multi-layer conditions with higher accuracy. The proposed technique requires no affiliate information besides lidar signals, which provide a convenient method for PBLH determination under complicated conditions.

Development of ZJU High-Spectral-Resolution Lidar for Aerosol and Cloud: Extinction Retrieval

“…The lidar ratio from the standard method oscillates significantly with the height, and it is difficult to obtain reasonable values for the lidar ratio in the region of low aerosol loading with low SNR. However, the results from the IIR method demonstrate that the IIR method not only obtains a finer structure of the aerosol layer under the condition of low SNR, but is also able to retrieve more reasonable values of the lidar ratio, as the aerosol below the planetary boundary layer is relatively stable and generally well-mixed [38,39].…”

Assessing CALIOP-Derived Planetary Boundary Layer Height Using Ground-Based Lidar

“…The well-known drawback of estimating PBLH from lidar measurements is the selection of the top of an elevated aerosol layer as PBLH, instead the selection of the true PBLH [53]. Several methods to improve PBLH detection under multilayer conditions have been proposed [54][55][56]. Some of our results in Figure 2 may suffer from this drawback.…”

“…They selected only the sounding data with more than 10 data levels at or below 500 hPa. However, an uncertainty is expected in PBLH obtained from sounding An additional 80 data pairs were removed after filtering out multilayer cases, and 67 (56) data pairs remained for daytime (nighttime). Although several cases with large differences are still shown for nighttime, the PBLHs from the two instruments have better agreement in Figure 6 compared with Figure 2.…”

Variance of air temperature in the atmospheric surface layer with temperature inversion

“…The level, where the turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) dissipation rate or the vertical wind variance tend to zero (as compared to values near the underlying surface), is also used as an indicator of the height S h [7][8]. Estimates of S h from lidar profiles of aerosol concentrations are considered in [9][10][11][12]. Different techniques for determining the height S h of the mixing layer (or ABL height) are reviewed, for example, in [13][14][15].…”