MPL Planetary Boundary Layer Heights at Golden, Fort Collins and Platteville

Abstract

Three micropulse lidars and one elastic lidar were employed at three sites in order to get backscatter, extinction, and PBL height estimates. We show here the PBL comparisons between the lidars and the aircraft profiles. PBL Heights are retrieved from aerosol gradients typically which occur at the top of the PBL where it interacts with a clearer free troposphere. In Colorado, this was not always the case as air aloft had substantially the same aerosol load on many days. The PBL retrieval uses the Haar wavelet to determine this gradient and the parameters for this wavelet were adjusted for aerosol loading, heating and time of day.