Abstract:
Aerosols and clouds are of central importance for global climate, atmospheric chemistry and physics, ecosystems and public health. In order to better understand effects on the environment, knowledge of their vertical structure, including parameters such as the thickness, location, top and bottom height, is necessary. In this work we present several examples of lidar monitoring of clouds and aerosols layers which are chosen from the measurements performed in the period 2006-2012. The investigations are carried out with an aerosol lidar, equipped with Nd:YAG laser at wavelengths 532 nm and 1064 nm. Lidar is located in the Institute of Electronics of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Experimental data are presented in terms of vertical backscatter coefficient profiles and color maps of the atmospheric field stratification evolution. The results of our atmospheric studies have demonstrated that clouds could be formed with widely differing thicknesses (in the interval 0.5–5 km) and could exist at various heights (2-16 km) in the troposphere up to the tropopause. Some experiments illustrate simultaneously detection of clouds and Saharan dust layers. Also, here we include results of lidar detection of anthropogenic aerosol load over Sofia city. We employed HYSPLIT (HYbrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) backward trajectories and DREAM (Dust REgional Atmospheric Model) forecasts to make conclusions about atmospheric aerosol’s origin. Depicted measurements are extracted from regular lidar investigations of the atmosphere within the framework of the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network (EARLINET).