Lidar beams in opposite directions for quality assessment of Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization spaceborne measurements

International audienceWe present the "lidar beams in opposite directions" (LIBOD) technique and applications for quality assessment of spaceborne observations made by Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) onboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation satellite. LIBOD is applicable to standard total backscatter lidar because it does not require a priori knowledge of the particle extinction-to-backscatter ratio. In this paper, we present (i) an objective assessment of the lidar signal quality and representativity of correlative ground-based lidar and CALIOP measurements only using normalized range-corrected lidar signals and (ii) a numerical filtering and optimization technique for reducing the spurious oscillations induced by noisy signal differentiation as needed for retrieval of particle extinction coefficients and extinction-to-backscatter ratio profiles. Numerical simulations and Monte Carlo tests are conducted for assessing the performance of the LIBOD technique. The applications are illustrated with examples of actual correlative 532nm lidar profiles from CALIOP and a groundbased lidar deployed in Tamanrasset in the heart of Sahara in 2006 and near Strasbourg, France, in 2007. © 2010 Optical Society of America