LICHT

LICHT#

LICHT Raman Lidar, 3D drawing LICHT Raman Lidar at BCO at night

The Raman lidar system LICHT (LIdar for Cloud, Humidity and Temperature profiling) was designed and built in 2013 to expand the observation capability of MPI-M and in particular to be replacement system for EARLI lidar deployed at that moment at the BCO station. The LICHT lidar has similar measurement characteristics to EARLI and was already designed for high isolation from the outdoor environment. Besides better protection against a harsh environment, the LICHT lidar is capable of obtaining daytime water vapor measurements. Operation range for LICHT was extended from 15 km to 29 km on June 14, 2017. In addition, LICHT is equipped with automated window washing installation (built in and activated on July 7, 2017) that allows significant improvement of data quality thanks to reduced transmission losses on output and input windows of lidar container. The LICHT lidar system was deployed at BCO from July 2016 until December 2019. The LICHT lidar operated on board of the German research vessel Meteor during the EUREC4A campaign (January to February, 2020).

In 2026, we will remove CORAL for maintenance and reinstall LICHT at the BCO… more from this instrument soon!

Configurations#

The processing from Level 0 to Level 1 data results in two products: slow and fast. The data in the slow product is smoothed in time over the temperature smoothing window. The fast product is smoothed in time over the user-specified smoothing window for the rest of variables (default is 2min, the time interval of the Level 0 data). Therefore, each of the following configurations results in a slow (labeled with t) and a fast (labeled with b) product. The lidar has been operated in different configurations over time.

LICHT has been operated with two height range configurations:

  • 2min timestep, 118min temperature smoothing, 20m-15km range from 2016-07-17 until 2017-06-13 available as BCO.lidar_LICHT_LR_t_c1_v1 and BCO.lidar_LICHT_LR_b_c1_v1

  • 2min timestep, 118min temperature smoothing, 20m-29km range from 2017-06-17 until 2019-12-06 available as BCO.lidar_LICHT_LR_t_c2_v1 and BCO.lidar_LICHT_LR_b_c2_v1

Current data availability#

Efforts to integrate all resolutions and smoothings for the whole timeline of the instrument’s operation to our automated processing pipelines are ongoing. As such, data with low resolution is available as .zarr in the catalog:

  • BCO.lidar_LICHT_lowres_rolling_v1.zarr

  • BCO.lidar_LICHT_lowres_reanalysis_v1.zarr

where rolling uses calibrations from 3 days before the processed date, and reanalysis uses calibrations from 3 days before and after the processed date. Calibration constants are written to the catalog as well, as .zarr under BCO.lidar_LICHT_calib_v1.

On board METEOR#

For the deployments on board the METEOR ship, please have a look at the METEOR page.

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