Radiation fog formation alerts using attenuated backscatter power from automatic lidars and ceilometers

Abstract

Abstract. Radiation fog occurs over many locations around the world in stable atmospheric conditions. Air traffic at busy airports can be significantly disrupted because low visibility at the ground makes it unsafe to take off, land and taxi on the ground. Current numerical weather prediction forecasts are able to predict general conditions favorable for fog formation, but not the exact time or location of fog occurrence. A selected set of observations available in near-real time at strategic locations could also be useful to track the evolution of key processes and key parameters that drive fog formation. Such observations could complement the information predicted by numerical weather prediction (NWP) models that is made available to airport forecasters in support of their fog forecast. This paper presents an experimental setup based on collocated automatic lidar and ceilometer measurements, relative humidity measurements and horizontal visibility measurements to study hygroscopic growth of fog condensation nuclei. This process can take several minutes to hours, and can be tracked using lidar-or ceilometer-attenuated backscatter profiles. Based on hygroscopic growth laws we derive a set of parameters that can be used to provide alerts minutes to hours prior to formation of radiation fog. We present an algorithm that uses the temporal evolution of attenuated backscatter measurements to derive pre-fog formation alerts. The performance of the algorithm is tested on 45 independent pre-fog situations at two locations (near Paris, France, and Brussels, Belgium). We find that an alert for pre-fog conditions predominantly occurs 10-50 min prior to fog formation at an altitude ranging 0 to 100 m above ground. In a few cases, alerts can occur up to 100 min prior to fog formation. Alert durations are found to be sensitive to the relative humidity conditions found a few hours prior to the fog.

Radiation in fog: quantification of the impact on fog liquid water based on ground-based remote sensing

“…Its cloud-base height is found using a threshold value in the attenuated backscatter from the ceilometer of 2 × 10 −4 m −1 sr −1 , following Haeffelin et al (2016). The cloud-base height is set to 0 m if the horizontal visibility at 4 m is below 1 km.…”

Hygroscopic growth study in the framework of EARLINET during the SLOPE I campaign: synergy of remote sensing and in situ instrumentation

“…Also, it is possible to use aerosol extinction coefficient to compare with in situ airborne measures and elastic lidar to study hygroscopic growth in unmodified ambient conditions. In addition, good results were obtained by using automatic lidar and ceilometers (ALCs) to investigate hygroscopic growth and fog formation, mostly for fog event forecasting purposes (Haeffelin et al, 2016).…”

Near-real-time processing of a ceilometer network assisted with sun-photometer data: monitoring a dust outbreak over the Iberian Peninsula

“…Originally designed for cloud base determination, their performance has been improved in the last few years. Their capabilities have been shown for determining planetary boundary layer (e.g., Wiegner et al, 2006;Münkel et al, 2007;Haeffelin et al, 2012;Pandolfi et al, 2013), detection and forecast of fog (Haeffelin et al, 2016), and recent efforts have been conducted to quantify the aerosol optical information that can be derived from ceilometers Heese et al, 2010.…”