Lidar Observation of Planetary Boundary Layer Characteristic over

The need to characterize in a robust way Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) Heights is crucial as in air quality forcast and transport models. Incorrect determination of PBL heights can severely distort the surface level PM2.5 predictions crucial in determining whether New York City is in compliance. It has been amply demonstrated that lidar systems have repeatedly proven to be valuable tools in the study of the process of PBL. Therefore, it is useful to explore automated robust methods for PBL height retrieval. This presentation will focus on the determination of PBL height by using combination of Laplacian Transform and Wavelet Transform. The improvement by using Laplacian Transform will be briefly explained. With numerous lidar measurements over years, we can also categorize PBL and characterize them base on temperatures, humidity and optical depth. Further applications to other vertical resolving data from Calipso, Ceilometer and Micropulse Lidar will be explored. In particular, we find that Wavelet techniques are more robust then 2D edge detection filters.