Extending and Merging the Purple Crow Lidar Temperature Rayleigh and Vibrational Raman Climatologies
Degree
Master of Science
Program
Physics
Supervisor
Dr. R. J. Sica
Abstract
Rayleigh and Raman scatter measurements from The University ofWestern Ontario Purple Crow Lidar (PCL) have been used to develop temperature climatologies for the stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere using data from 1994 to 2013 (Rayleigh system) and from 1999 to 2013 (vibrational Raman system). Temperature retrievals from Rayleigh-scattering lidar measurements have been performed using the methods by Hauchecorne and Chanin (1980; henceforth HC) and Khanna et al. (2012). Argall and Sica (2007) used the HC method to compute a climatology of the PCL measurements from 1994 to 2004 for 35 to 110 km, while Iserhienrhien et al. (2013) applied the same technique from 1999 to 2007 for 10 to 35 km. Khanna et al. (2012) used the inversion technique to retrieve atmospheric temperature profiles and found that it had advantages over the HC method. This thesis presents an extension of the PCL climatologies created by Argall and Sica (2007) and Iserhienrhien et al. (2013). Both the inversion and HC methods were used to form the Rayleigh climatology, while only the latter was adopted for the Raman climatology. Then, two different approaches were used to merge the climatologies from 10 to 110 km. In the first approach, the climatologies were calculated from the nightly temperature profiles and then merged. In the second approach, a climatology was calculated after merging the nightly PCL temperature profiles. The results show that the temperature climatologies produced by the HC method when using a seed pressure are comparable to the climatologies produced by the inversion method. It is not close to the inversion method when using a seed temperature. The Rayleigh extended climatology is slightly warmer below 80 km and slightly colder above 80 km. There are no significant differences in temperature between the extended and the previous Raman channel climatologies. Among four different functional identities, a trigonometric hyperbolic relation results in the best choice for merging temperature profiles, with an estimated uncertainty of 0.9 K.
Recommended Citation
Jalali, Ali, "Extending and Merging the Purple Crow Lidar Temperature Rayleigh and Vibrational Raman Climatologies" (2014). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2490.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2490