Accurate temperature profiling of the atmospheric boundary layer using an ultraviolet rotational Raman lidar

An ultraviolet rotational Raman lidar (RRL) system at an eye-safe wavelength of 354.7 nm is demonstrated for profiling the vertical temperature of the atmospheric layer. Two sets of narrow-band interference filters, which central wavelengths are located at 353.9 and 352.5 nm, respectively, are employed to block the elastic Mie- and Rayleigh-scattering signals and to separate two required rotational Raman signals for temperature retrieval. Experiments were carried out for verifying the feasibility of the prototype of the ultraviolet RRL from May to November in 2008, and the system calibrations were performed with the radiosonde data which were obtain from the local meteorological bureau, and good agreements were got in the experiment results. The observation results show that a statistical temperature error of less then 1 K was obtained up to the heights of 2.5 km for nighttime and 2.0 km for daytime with 300 mJ laser energy and ∼8 min observation time.