A Comparison of Wintertime Atmospheric Boundary Layer Heights Determined by Tethered Balloon Soundings and Lidar at the Site of SACOL

Abstract

High-precision and -resolution atmospheric boundary layer height (BLH) has received increasing attention in air pollution research in recent years. The low time resolution of sounding data is the main challenge to validate BLH retrieval from lidar observations. To resolve this issue, we conducted simultaneous tethered balloon sounding and lidar observations at the Semi-Arid Climate and Environment Observatory of Lanzhou University (SACOL) during winter 2019–2020. The BLHs derived from the tethered balloon sounding data were 170, 210, 393, 676, 423, and 190 m at 02:00, 08:00, 11:00, 14:00, 17:00, and 20:00 (Beijing time), respectively. The diurnal evolution of BLH was reasonably captured by lidar observation-based wavelet covariance transform and ideal profile fitting methods, which exhibited correlation coefficients of 0.91 and 0.89, respectively, with the BLHs determined from tethered balloon sounding data. The lidar results slightly overestimated the BLHs, though all results were acceptable when considering both the absolute and relative errors with respect to BLHs from the tethered balloon data. Our results revealed high-precision and -resolution diurnal variations in BLH at SACOL in Northwest China and suggest the importance of validating lidar-based BLHs using simultaneous sounding data.