Polar Stratospheric Clouds identification in Antarctica by Micro Pulse Lidar depolarization

Abstract

The scientific community considers the use of lidar depolarization as a key tool for climate-related cloud and aerosol studies because depolarization measurements provide information about the shape and/or the thermodynamic phase of the particles in the atmosphere. In this work the first Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSC) lidar depolarization observations made by using an improved version of Micro Pulse Lidar (MPL) over the Argentinean Belgrano II station (Antarctica) are presented. This study focuses on the analysis of MPL depolarization measurements in comparison with CALIPSO observations for the PSC characterization. Both the 2009 and 2010 winter data, from May to September periods, are used for that purpose.