Algorithm to retrieve aerosol optical properties from high-spectral- resolution lidar and polarization mie-scattering lidar measurements

We developed an algorithm to estimate the vertical profiles of extinction coefficients at 532 nm for three aerosol types that are water-soluble, soot, and dust particles, using the extinction and backscattering coefficients at 532 nm for total aerosols derived from high-spectral-resolution lidar (HSRL) measurements and the receiving signal at 1064 nm and total depolarization ratio at 532 nm measured with Mie scattering lidar (MSL). The mode radii, standard deviations, and refractive indexes for each aerosol component are prescribed by the optical properties of aerosols and clouds database; the optical properties for each aerosol component are computed from Mie theory on the assumption that their particles are spherical and homogeneous, except for dust. To consider the effect of nonsphericity, the dust lidar ratio at 532 nm is assumed to be 50 sr, the value that is reported for Asian dust from the other observational studies. We performed sensitivity study on retrieval errors. The errors in extinction coefficient for each aerosol component were smaller than 30% and 60% when the measurement errors were ±5% and ±10%. We demonstrated the ability of the algorithm by applying to the HSRL + MSL data measured at Tsukuba, Japan. Plumes consisting of water-soluble aerosols, soot, dust, or their mixture were retrieved; these results were consistent with simulation with a global aerosol transport model. Introducing the dust lidar ratio significantly improved a correlation between the retrieved dust concentration and the aerosol depolarization ratio at 532 nm derived from HSRL + MSL than the use of spherical dust optical model in the retrieval.