Analysis of Combined Temperature, Wind and Water Vapor PPI Scans During Land-Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE)

In August 2017, the Land-Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE) took place in the ARM SGP site in Oklahoma, USA. During the experiment, several state-of-the-art scanning lidar and remote sensing systems were deployed. During that part of the summer time, large differences in surface fluxes between different fields and bare soil can be observed, e.g., pastures vs. fields where the corn has already been harvested or bean soy fields were growing.

Understanding of the effects of these surface properties in the diurnal atmospheric convective boundary layer (CBL), requires a combined measurement of soil and vegetation properties as well as land surface fluxes. A synergy of scanning, state-of-the-art scanning lidar system was deployed to support these measurements. An important question is how these instruments can be combined and what scan pattern should be applied for studying land-atmosphere feedback and land surface heterogeneity.

Some of the remote sensing systems that were deployed are the NOAA Doppler lidar (NOAA DALEK, the University of Hohenheim (UHOH) water-vapor differential absorption lidar (UDIAL), and the UHOH temperature Raman lidar (URL). A special scan strategy was the application of simultaneous PPI scans measuring horizontal mean profiles and gradients of moisture, temperature, and horizontal wind.

While the three co-located lidars were performing coordinated PPI scans, the University of Oklahoma Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS)

In this presentation, we demonstrate the first performance and analysis of PPIs scanning water-vapor, temperature, and wind lidar systems. Particularly, we investigate whether it is possible to detect the development and coherence of microscale and mesoscale structures driven by land surface heterogeneities in the region of the SGP site which is important for surface layer parameterizations.