Measurements of sensible and latent heat flux profiles in the convective boundary layer with lidar

Thermodynamic fields of temperature and moisture including their turbulent fluctuations have been observed with the two scanning lidar systems of University of Hohenheim together with wind measurements of the Doppler lidar of NOAA during LAFE (Land-Atmosphere Feedback Experiment) in August 2017. LAFE took place at the site of the Southern Great Plains (SGP) observatory of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program in Oklahoma, USA. Accurate and precise thermodynamic data are essential as initial fields for numerical weather forecast. Forecast experiments have shown that lidar data promise to improve these fields in the model and thus the forecasts of clouds and precipitation. But due to their high resolution and high precision, lidar systems are also capable of resolving turbulent fluctuations in the atmosphere. The correlation of turbulent temperature or moisture fluctuations with vertical wind fluctuations allows for deriving the mean sensible and latent heat flux, respectively, from their co-variance (eddy correlation technique). We show that the combination of different lidar systems is capable of providing profiles of the sensible and latent heat flux throughout the convective boundary layer including the entrainment zone. The resulting new data sets are especially interesting for the validation and improvement of model parameterizations.