Intercomparisons Between Lidar and Satellite Instruments in the Middle Atmosphere

The comparison of ground and ship-based lidar measurements of atmospheric temperature, ozone, and wind to similar measurements made from orbiting satellites is a unique challenge.   In this talk we will discuss general challenges associated with (i) determining coincidence by compensating for geographic and temporal offsets, (ii) satellite-lidar sampling errors, and (iii) comparing results made by different techniques. 

We will show that comparisons of absolute temperature improve when the ground based measurements are compared to a composite satellite profile, created by a weighted average of multiple profiles from one overpass, instead of comparing to the single satellite profile from the closest approach. 

We discuss the importance of including the variation between consecutive satellite profiles for a given overpass in addition to the given satellite instrument uncertainty when calculating the error budget of the comparisons, even when comparing to single satellite profiles. 

We demonstrate how comparing lidar and satellite measurements of events such as small-scale fast moving gravity waves over a particular geographic region can be affected by instrument averaging kernels.

Illustrative examples we will be showing include lidar measurements made during recent instrument validation campaigns at L’Observatoire de Haute Provence (OHP, 43.93 N, 5.71 E), La Réunion (21.17 S, 55.37 E), Hohenpeißenberg Meteorological Observatory (47.80 N, 11.00 E), and onboard the French Navy Research Ship Monge as well as satellite measurements from  the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), the Sounding of the Atmosphere by Broadband Emission Radiometry instrument (SABER), Global Ozone Monitoring by Occultation of Stars (GOMOS), and Atmospheric Dynamics Mission Aeolus (Aeolus).