Measurements of particle extinction coefficients at 1064 nm with lidar: temperature dependence of rotational Raman channels

Abstract

Aerosol intensive optical properties, including lidar ratio and particle depolarization ratio, are of vital importance for aerosol typing. However, aerosol intensive optical properties at near-infrared wavelength are less exploited by atmospheric lidar measurements, because of the comparably small backscatter cross section of Raman-scattering and a low efficiency of signal detection compared to what is commonly available at 355 nm and 532 nm. To obtain accurate optical properties of aerosols at near-infrared wavelength, we considered three factors: Raman-spectra selection, detector selection, and interference-filter optimization. Rotational Raman scattering has been chosen for Raman signal detection, because of the higher cross-section compared to vibrational Raman scattering. The optimization of the properties of the interference filter are based on a comprehensive consideration of both signal-to-noise ratio and temperature dependence of the simulated lidar signals. The interference filter that has eventually been chosen uses the central wavelength at 1056 nm and a filter bandwidth (full-width-at-half-maximum) of 6 nm. We built a 3-channel 1064-nm rotational Raman lidar. In this paper two methods are proposed to test the temperature dependence of the signal-detection unit and to evaluate the quality of the Raman signals. We performed two measurements to test the quality of the detection channel: cirrus clouds in the free troposphere and aerosols in the planetary boundary layer. Our analysis of the measured Raman signals shows a negligible temperature dependence of the Raman signals in our system. For cirrus measurements, the Raman signal profile did not show crosstalk even for the case of strong elastic backscatter from clouds, which was about 100 times larger than Rayleigh scattering in the case considered here. The cirrus-mean extinction-to-backscatter ratio (lidar ratio) was 27.8 ± 10.0 sr (1064 nm) at a height of 10.5-11.5 km above ground. For the aerosols in the planetary boundary layer, we found the mean lidar ratio of 38.9 ± 7.0 sr at a height of 1.0-3.0 km above ground.