A22C-07
Development of ground-based lidars for measuring H2O and O3 profiles in the troposphere

Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 12:00
3012 (Moscone West)
Tetsu Sakai1, Makoto Abo2, Le Hoai Phong Pham2, Osamu Uchino3, Tomohiro Nagai4, Toshiharu Izumi1, Isamu Morino5 and Chikao Nagasawa2, (1)Meteorological Research Institute, Meteorological Satellite and Observation System Research Department, Ibaraki, Japan, (2)Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan, (3)National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tsukuba, Japan, (4)Meteorological Research Inst., Ibaraki, Japan, (5)NIES National Institute of Environmental Studies, Ibaraki, Japan
Abstract:
Water vapor is the strongest natural greenhouse gas and a highly variable atmospheric constituent. It plays an important role of the energy transfer and the meteorological phenomena such as evaporation, vapor transport, cloud formation, and rainfall in the troposphere. Ozone is an important air pollutant that at high concentrations impacts on human health and ecosystem including crops and also a greenhouse gas that plays an important role in climate change. Aerosol is an important climate parameter and also one of the largest error sources (causes) in retrieval from solar reflected short wavelength infrared radiances observed with greenhouse gases observing satellites such as the GOSAT and OCO-2. Therefore, we have been developing ground-based differential absorption lidars (DIALs) for measuring the tropospheric water vapor, ozone and aerosols.

The water vapor DIAL employs two distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers operating at 829.054 nm for the online wavelength and 829.124 nm for the offline wavelength with tapered semiconductor optical amplifier (TSOA) in a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration, and utilizes pseudorandom coded pulse modulation technique.

It has started to measure the vertical distribution of lower tropospheric water vapor in order to improve accuracy and lead time of numerical weather prediction of local heavy rainfalls. Well-organized and regularly spaced convective cells of which vertical thickness were 200 m and the periods were 10 minutes were observed in the top of planetary boundary layer at 2.5 km altitude over Tokyo (35.66°N, 139.37°E) on 22 June 2015.

The ozone DIAL employs a Nd:YAG laser and a 2 m long Raman cell filled with CO2 gas which generates four Stokes lines (276.2, 287.2, 299.1, and 312.0 nm) of stimulated Raman scattering, and two receiving telescopes with diameters of 49 and 10 cm.

It has started to measure the vertical distributions of the tropospheric ozone as well as aerosols and thin cirrus cloud in order to validate GOSAT product. High concentrations of ozone and aerosols were observed below 2 km altitude on 22 March 2015 over Saga (33.24°N, 130.29°E), which could be transported with spherical aerosols and dust particles from Northeast Asia. The observational result of ozone will be compared with a chemistry-climate model.

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