Abstract

A primary concern in the design of satellite-borne Doppler lidar wind sensors is the extent to which atmospheric aerosol concentrations are sufficient to produce backscatter intense enough for accurate retrieval of wind estimates. Although some climatological data regarding the large-scale spatial and seasonal evolution of the global tropospheric aerosol field have become available within the past decade (Kent et al., 1991), our knowledge of the structure of aerosol fields on the synoptic scale and mesoscale remains inadequate. In an effort to investigate the structure of these fields and their relationships to meteorological phenomena, lidars operating at several wavelengths were flown aboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) DC8 on a number of flights in the Pacific Ocean basin during late 1989 and early 1990 as part of the Global Backscatter Experiment (GLOBE; Bowdle et al., 1991).

© 1993 Optical Society of America