Abstract. Lidar at 1064 nm and Ka-band millimetre-wave cloud radar (MMCR) are powerful tools for detecting the height distribution of cloud boundaries and can monitor the entire life cycle of cloud layers. In this study, lidar and MMCR
are employed to jointly detect cloud boundaries under different conditions.
By enhancing the echo signal of lidar at 1064 nm and combining its
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the cloud signal can be accurately extracted from
the aerosol signals and background noise. The interference signal is
eliminated from Doppler spectra of the MMCR by using the noise ratio of the
smallest measurable cloud signal (SNRmin) and the spectral point
continuous threshold (Nts). Moreover, the quality control of the
reflectivity factor of MMCR obtained by the inversion is conducted, which
improves the detection accuracy of the cloud signal. We analysed three
typical cases studies; case one presents two interesting phenomena: (a) at
19:00–20:00 CST (China standard time), the ice crystal particles at the
cloud top boundary are too small to be detected by MMCR, but they are well
detected by lidar. (b) At 19:00–00:00 CST, the cirrus cloud changes to
altostratus where the cloud particles eventually grow into large sizes,
producing precipitation. Further, MMCR has more advantages than lidar in
detection of the cloud top boundary within this period. Considering the
advantages of the two devices, the change characteristics of the cloud
boundary in Xi'an from December 2020 to November 2021 were analysed, with
MMCR detection data as the main data and lidar data as the assistant data.
The seasonal variation characteristics of clouds show that, in most cases,
high clouds often occur in summer and autumn, and the low clouds are usually in winter. The normalized cloud cover shows that the maximum and minimum cloud cover occur in summer and winter, respectively. Furthermore, the cloud boundary frequency distribution results for the whole of the observation period show that the cloud bottom boundary below 1.5 km is more than 1 %, the frequency within the height range of 3.06–3.6 km is approximately 0.38 %, and the frequency above 8 km is less than 0.2 %. The cloud top boundary
frequency distribution exhibits the characteristics of a bimodal
distribution. The first narrow peak lies at approximately 1.0–3.1 km, and
the second peak appears at 6.4–9.8 km.
