Studies on Aerosol Optical Properties at High Altitude Station in Western Himalayas Using Raman Lidar

Abstract

The aerosol optical properties have been investigated using the Raman lidar system for the month of November 2018 at the western Himalayan station of Palampur. Before deriving the optical properties, the lidar data has been applied with initial pre-processing such as Dead time correction, atmospheric noise correction, temporal and spatial averaging, range correction, gluing etc. The optical properties such as backscatter coefficient, extinction coefficient and linear depolarization ratio have been derived by using the inversion algorithm proposed by Fernald. The results show that the backscatter coefficient was found in the range from 9.00E-9 m−1sr−1 to 4.97E-6 m−1sr−1 and the extinction coefficient was found in the range from 3.16E-7m-1 to 1.74E-4m-1. The Linear depolarization ratio was in the range from 0.0179 to 0.621 with lower values at near heights suggesting the dominance of spherical particles at the lower heights. We have also observed a cloud layer at a height of 9.5 km to 12.1 km with high depolarization ratio during the observation period on 22/11/2018.