Determining the Scanning Strategies to Provide Tropospheric Profiles of Wind, Aerosol/Cloud Layers, and Backscatter with Doppler Lidars for Their Integration as Multifunction Sensors in Operational Weather Observing Networks

Most weather observing networks deployed worldwide use conventional weather stations providing the measurements of atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity at the ground level and wind speed and direction at 10m above the ground. Upper air measurements in the boundary layer and / or in the troposphere are much less available. Some countries developed their own network of radar wind profilers and / or ceilometers for operational uses especially for the data assimilation into numerical weather prediction models. Detailed measurements are also available at super sites like the ARM site in Oklahoma, USA for climate studies and atmospheric research. At these super sites, many types of sensors are deployed: radiosondes, radar wind profilers, radiometers, ceilometers, and Lidars for measuring vertical profiles of wind, aerosol, water vapor and temperature. Lidars are more and more used and since 5 years, several networks have been established with LIDAR sensors permanently installed like in the New York State Mesonet network deployed and operated by the State University of New York (SUNY).

The NYS Mesonet, deployed since 2016, is composed of 125 surface sites (pressure, temperature, humidity), 20 snow sites and 17 super sites for providing the full thermodynamic profiles along the troposphere with Microwave Radiometers and Doppler Lidars. In this network, the Doppler Lidars used are WINDCUBE100S systems. They have been configured in order to retrieve 10min wind profiles, retrievals of heights of cloud / aerosol layers, height of mixing and residual boundary layers and backscatter every 10 min.

This study will present the methodology used for determining the configuration of the Lidar and its scanning scenarios in order to meet the requirements of the network, to provide the required products at the expected update rate with the expected accuracy and precision. The study will also show the constraints linked to the post-processing algorithms applied on the raw data of the Lidar and how to adapt existing algorithms to provide the required products like the heights of the boundary layers with the same scanning scenario. Besides, the presentation will show the comparison between two algorithms DBS and VAD that are commonly used for retrieving the wind profiles in terms of data availability and accuracy.