Cirrus clouds play an important role in radiative transfer, and thus have impact on the energy balance of the atmosphere and the climate of the Earth. Furthermore, they occur often and cover large areas globally at any time. Nevertheless, cirrus clouds are poorly studied, especially in the polar regions. Cirrus clouds are present in a large amount of the 14 years of data produced by the lidar at the Swedish Institude of Space Physics (IRF), but has not been studied to a large extent. A lidar is an active remote sensing instrument using a laser. This master's thesis develops and improves programs for analysis of cirrus clouds from this lidar data. It also performs analysis of six case studies chosen from the available data, and statistics of these six cases. The parameters calculated for each date are the cloud top, base and mean altitude, the geometrical thickness, the depolarisation ratio, the backscatter ratio (BSR), the backscatter coefficient, the extinction coefficient, the optical thickness and the number of cloud layers. No clear correlation between the optical thickness and the cloud top, base or mean altitude was found. There seems to be a weak correlation between increased optical thickness and increased geometrical thickness, which is not unreasonable. The mean cloud layer top altitude was 11.82 km and the mean cloud base was 10.36 km. The mean optical thickness for a cloud layer was 1.46 km, and the average of the cloud layer mean altitude was 11.09 km. It should be noted that the statistical analysis is based on only six cases with a total observation time of no more than 37 hours. A far larger dataset is needed in order to obtain any statistically signicant conclusions. The effect of averaging is studied, and it is concluded that averaging over altitude reduced the noise and facilitated the interpolation more than averaging over time did. Different approaches to obtain the molecular backscatter coefficient are compared, as well as the effect on the simulated molecular signal. Two of these approaches calculate the molecular backscatter coeffcient with input of the temperature and pressure either as continuously measured ground vales from the weather station at IRF or as radiosonde profiles for a specific time. In the other two, the molecular backscatter coeffcient is obtained from ECMWF data and from the standard atmosphere. Differences in the range 12-35% between the methods are found. Different approaches to calculate the backscatter ratio (BSR) are also compared. At cirrus altitudes, the decrease in the signal due to the molecular cloudfree part of the atmosphere is still strong, and finding the top and base separately by comparison with the standard deviation of the signal is proven a better method than interpolating between the point where the signal starts to increase and the point where it reaches the same signal value again. Height-normalising the signal provides a more robust method. For thin cirrus, the signal is not significantly attenuated above the cloud layer, and it is found that a method based on the ratios between the measured signal and the simulated molecular signal at cloud top and base did not produce reliable results for the optical thickness. In addition to analysing data and data processing methods, new data processing tools in MATLAB have been developed and existing functions have been improved. These will be valuable for continued studies with the IRF lidar, for cirrus as well as PSCs and thick and/or low-altitude clouds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ltu-76574 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Edman, Jennifer |
| Publisher | Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för system- och rymdteknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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