Understanding the Roles of Aerosols and Clouds in Environment, Meteorology and Climate with Advanced Lidar Remote Sensing Techniques

Abstract

This Special Issue lists nine publications, covering the topics of advanced atmospheric lidar techniques, lidar retrievals, and lidar applications. The investigations listed here are diverse, but they are all focused on atmospheric lidars. Some urgent issues, for instance low blind zone detection and polarization detection at a near-infrared wavelength band, were discussed and explored. The results are helpful for extending atmospheric lidar applications. In terms of lidar retrievals, a planetary boundary layer height retrieval and an automatic lidar retrieval for aerosol optical properties were investigated in some of the publications, which can strengthen the atmospheric lidar capabilities. For lidar applications, a detailed analysis of the evolution of stratospheric aerosol and dust–cloud interactions was presented. In this Editorial, the articles published within this Special Issue are reviewed to highlight their innovative contributions and main research findings.

Keywords

• atmospheric lidar
• blind zone
• dust
• Doppler lidar
• lidar retrieval
• planetary boundary layer