Recent Developments in Airborne Lidar Measurements of Ozone, Water Vapor, and Aerosols

Abstract

Major advances have taken place in the last 3 years in the development and application of airborne lidar systems in the measurement of ozone (O3), water vapor (H2O), and aerosols in various regions of the atmosphere. The first simultaneous measurements of O3 and aerosol distributions above and below an aircraft were made in tropospheric investigations in the Arctic during the summer of 1988 as part of the NASA Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE), and this capability was subsequently used in the 1990 GTE field experiment over Canada. During the 1989 Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Experiment, the first large-scale distributions of O3 and polar stratospheric clouds (at multiple laser wavelengths) were obtained with an airborne lidar system on long-range flights into the wintertime Arctic vortex. An alexandrite laser was used for the first time in airborne lidar measurements of H2O profiles during flight experiments over the Atlantic in the summer of 1989, and improved H2O measurements were made in flight tests during 1990 and 1991.