Analysis of Boundary Layer Height in the Indianapolis Urban Area Using Doppler Lidar

The Boundary Layer Height (BLH) is an important factor in understanding atmospheric processes and imperative for many applications including air quality and validation of numerical weather prediction models (NWP). The paper presents diurnal variability of BLH determined from Halo Photonics Stream Line XR Doppler Lidar measurements during the 2016-2018 Indianapolis Flux Experiment (INFLUX, Davis et al. 2017). The BLH was estimated using the novel composite fuzzy logic approach (Bonin et al 2018) that integrates the data from various scan types, including conical and vertical-slice scans and zenith stares. The accuracy of BLH estimates using this technique was previously tested on the lidar data from 2016 and good agreement was shown with BLH estimates using data from other instruments such as research aircraft and radiosonde (Bonin et al 2018). In our paper, we present analysis of inter-annual and inter-seasonal variability of BLH using 2016-2018 lidar measurements and relate the BLH to other quantities measured by the Doppler lidar such as 3D wind components, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), and the cloud base height.