Characterizing warm atmospheric boundary layer over land by combining Raman and Doppler lidar measurements

For PBLH, the approach classifies PBL water vapor structures into a few general patterns, then uses a slope method and dynamic threshold method to determine PBLH. For MLH, wavelet analysis is used to re-construct 2-D variance from DL vertical wind velocity measurements according to the turbulence eddy size to minimize the impacts of gravity wave and eddy size on variance calculations; then, a dynamic threshold method is used to determine MLH.

Remotely-sensed PBLHs and MLHs are compared with radiosonde measurements based on the Richardson number method. Good agreements between them confirm that the proposed new algorithms are reliable for PBLH and MLH characterization. The algorithms are applied to warm seasons' RL and ML measurements at the SGP site for five years to study warm season PBL structure and processes.

The weekly composited diurnal evolutions of PBLHs and MLHs in warm climate were provided to illustrate diurnal and seasonal PBL evolutions. This reliable PBLH and MLH dataset will be valuable for PBL process study, model evolution, and PBL parameterization improvement.