Pure Rotational Raman Lidar for Temperature Measurements from 5-40 Km Over Wuhan, China

In this paper a pure rotational Raman lidar(PRR) was established for the atmospheric temperaturemeasurements from 5 km to 40 km over Wuhan, China (30.5°N, 114.5°E). To extract the expected PRR signals and simultaneously suppress the elastically backscattered light, a high- spectral resolution polychromatorfor light splitting and filtering was designed. Observational results revealed that the temperature difference measured by PRR lidarand the local radiosondebelow 30 km was less than 3.0 K. The good agreement validated the reliability of the PRR lidar. With the 1-h integration and 150-m spatial resolution, the statistical temperature error for PRR lidarincreases from 0.4 K at 10 km up to 4 K at altitudes of about 30 km. In addition, the whole night temperature profiles were obtained for study of the long-term observation of atmospheric fluctuations.