Transmittance ratio constrained retrieval technique for lidar cirrus measurements

This letter describes a lidar retrieval technique that uses the transmittance ratio as a constraint to determine an average lidar ratio as well as extinction and backscatter coefficients of transparent cirrus clouds. The cloud transmittance ratio is directly obtained from two adjacent elastic lidar backscatter signals. The technique can be applied to cirrus measurements where neither the molecular scattering dominant signals above and below the cloud layer are found nor cloudfree reference profiles are available. The technique has been tested with simulated lidar signals and applied to backscatter lidar measurements at Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia.