Improved identification of the solution space of aerosol microphysical properties derived from the inversion of profiles of lidar optical data, part 3: Case studies

Abstract

We conclude our series of publications on the development of the gradient correlation method (GCM) which can be used for an improved stabilization of the solution space of particle microphysical parameters derived from measurements with multiwavelength Raman and High‐Spectral‐Resolution Lidar (3 backscatter + 2 extinction coefficients). We show results of three cases studies. The data were taken with a ground‐based multiwavelength Raman lidar during the Saharan Mineral Dust Experiment (SAMUM) in the Cape Verde Islands (North Atlantic). These cases describe mixtures of dust with smoke. For our data analysis we separated the contribution of smoke to the total signal and only used these optical profiles for the test of GCM. The results show a significant stabilization of the solution space of the particle microphysical parameter retrieval on the particle radius domain from 0.03 μm to 10 μm, the real part of the complex refractive index domain from 1.3 to 1.8 and the imaginary part from 0 to 0.1. This new method will be included in TiARA (Tikhonov Advanced Regularization Algorithm) which is a fully automated, unsupervised algorithm that is used for the analysis of the world‐wide first airborne 3 backscatter + 2 extinction high‐spectral‐resolution lidar developed by NASA Langley Research Center.