High‐Precision Measurements of Lower Atmospheric Temperature Based on Pure Rotational Raman Lidar

Abstract

AbstractA pure rotational Raman (PRR) lidar system was built for high precision temperature measurements in the atmosphere from 10 km to 40 km height over Wuhan, China (30.5°N, 114.4°E). State of the art interference filters for light splitting and filtering were designed to extract the required PRR signals and suppress elastically backscattered light. Observational results reveal that the maximum deviation of temperatures measured by the PRR lidar and the local radiosonde below 30 km is about 3.0 K, showing good consistency and reliability of the lidar. Obvious deviations may occur because of the balloon drifts, regional differences and special phenomena like the thermal inversion layer. Temperature profiles at different temporal scales are conductive to analysis of the wave properties and microstructures. For the 30 min integrated lidar temperature profile, the statistical error is about 0.3 K for altitudes of 10∼20 km with 300 m spatial resolution; ∼0.8 K for 20∼30 km with 600 m resolution; and 3.0 K for 30∼40 km with 900 m resolution, respectively. Besides, one‐night temperature profiles are given for the long‐term observation of the atmospheric thermal structure. Temperature measurement up to 40 km by the PRR lidar shows great potential for the further combination with the Rayleigh lidar of 30∼80 km detection capacity, which provides an effective means for the study of the lower atmosphere to the upper stratosphere.