Atmospheric boundary-layer height estimation by adaptive Kalman filtering of lidar data

Abstract

A solution based on a Kalman filter to trace the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) sensed by an elastic backscatter lidar is presented. An erf-like profile is used to model the mixing layer top and the entrainment zone thickness. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) enables to retrieve and track the ABL parameters based on simplified statistics of the ABL dynamics and of the observation noise present in the lidar signal. This adaptive feature permits to analyze atmospheric scenes with low signal-to-noise ratios without need to resort to long time averages or rangesmoothing techniques, as well as to pave the way for an automated detection method. First EKF results based on synthetic lidar profiles are presented and compared with a typical least-squares inversion for different SNR scenarios.