We present the first, to the best of our knowledge, measurements from a new lidar facility that was designed and built at the University of Hertforshire since 2012. LITES (Lidar Innovations for Technologies and Environmental Sciences) allows testing, developing, and measuring of a multitude of climate-change relevant parameters of atmospheric particulate pollution and photochemically reactive trace gases. The core of LITES consists of a lidar spectroscopy instrument. In this first contribution, for example, we present the design and specifications of this instrument, its performance, and potential applications. First, we show examples of the measurements of range-resolved pure rotational Raman spectra and rotational-vibrational Raman spectra of air molecules with a spectral resolution better than 5cm-1. We also present day-time temperature profiles obtained from pure rotational spectroscopic lidar signals. In future work, we aim to explore the potential of our multi-channel high-resolution spectrometric lidar to obtain vertically resolved chemical characterization of aerosols and trace gases.