Atmospheric Measurement Techniques

Abstract. The atmospheric boundary layer height was de-rived at two locations in the city of Lanzhou (China) and its suburb rural area Yuzhong. The aerosol backscatter li-dar measurements were analysed using a wavelet technol-ogy and the parcel method was applied to profiling mi-crowave radiometer observations. For a few occasions the average boundary layer height and entrainment zone thick-ness was derived in convective situations at Yuzhong. Re-sults from selected observation days show that both datasets agree in strong convective situations. However, for weak con-vective situations the lidar measurements reveal boundary layer heights that are higher compared to the microwave observations, because a decrease of the thermal boundary layer height does not directly lead to a change of aerosols in that altitude layer. Finally, the entrainment zone thick-nesses are compared with theoretical predictions, and the results show that the measurements are compatible with theoretical models.