Retrievals of Column CO2 Densities from Pulsed Airborne Lidar Measurements

We present results from our summer 2010 CO2 measurement campaign using the NASA Goddard CO2 lidar sounder onboard the NASA DC-8 aircraft platform. This instrument is a candidate for NASA's ASCENDS space mission. The airborne instrument steps a pulsed wavelength-tunable laser transmitter across the 1572.33 nm CO2 line in thirty steps at a 300 Hz repetition rate. The line transmission shape, optical depth, and column densities for the CO2 are obtained from a retrieval algorithm that fits the observed scan while accounting for atmospheric temperature, pressure, water vapor and the lidar's wavelength response. We present results from flights over Railroad Valley Nevada, the ARM site in Oklahoma, and a flight over the Pacific Ocean. During our most recent summer 2011 campaign we flew our instrument over solid and broken cloud as well as smoke from forest fires. Preliminary results from these more challenging conditions will be presented. A second part of the presentation asks how many independent pieces of information about the CO2 vertical profile are retrievable for a given CO2 lidar instrument configuration. We explore how changing the instrument signal to noise and changing the number of wavelengths where the absorption is measured impacts the amount of information in the retrieved CO2 vertical profile. For example if we want CO2 concentrations from 2 independent altitude layers how many wavelength samples, at a given signal to noise, are needed? We consider instrument configurations where only two wavelengths are sampled (simple on-line off-line) up to configurations where 30 wavelengths are sampled.