A first measurement of the Planetary Boundary Layer top in Cali-Colombia: Elastic LiDAR application

TL;DR

This study introduces a new multispectral LiDAR system in Cali, Colombia, to measure the Planetary Boundary Layer top and aerosol properties, filling a regional data gap and enabling detailed atmospheric analysis.

Contribution

It presents the first implementation of a multispectral LiDAR system in Cali and develops a hybrid algorithm for PBL and aerosol property estimation.

Findings

Successful measurement of PBL top in Cali using LiDAR

Development of a hybrid data analysis algorithm

First quantitative atmospheric study in northwest South America

Abstract

The monitoring of the impact of aerosols in Latin America on a local scale is usually limited due to the infrastructure and instrumentation available. In Colombia, there are two international ground surface monitoring networks, the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) and the Latin American LIDAR NETwork (LALINET). However, the AERONET performance relies on only one sun photometer which makes measurements distributed among five ground-based stations in different cities such as Bogot\'a and Medell\'in. On the other hand, LALINET has only one ground-based station formed by an elastic LiDAR system located at Medell\'in. Although Cali is the largest city of Colombian southwestern, with an accelerated grown rate of both urban and vehicular fleet, and counts with the third largest population of this country, is not reached by these networks. Here, we report on the implementation of a monostatic-coaxial multispectral LiDAR system using a pulsed Nd:YAG laser with 450 mJ of average energy at 1064 nm. To perform the atmospheric measurements, this system is capable of spatially resolving elastic backscatter down to 3.75 m with a Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) of 10 Hz. We have developed a hybrid algorithm for data analysis by combining the Fitting and Gradient method and the Klett-Fernald algorithm to estimate the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) Top and the optical properties of aerosols. This work constitutes the first quantitative atmospheric exploration to study the aerosols dynamics and the PBL in the northwest of South America.