Research on the Simultaneous Measurement Method of Atmospheric Temperature and Pressure Profiles Based on the Lidar Echo Energy and Characteristics of the Scattering Spectrum

Lidar plays an important role in the detection of atmospheric environmental parameters due to its property of high detection accuracy, good real-time performance, and high spatiotemporal resolution. Measuring the spectral properties of molecular scattered light enables to determine the profiles of atmospheric parameters such as wind speed, temperature, and pressure with high vertical resolution (~100 m) by using sophisticated multiparameter inversion algorithms. So far, atmospheric measurements of Rayleigh–Brillouin (RB) spectrum were used to only determine temperature, using pressure from respective models or from measurements such as radiosondes. In this article, we propose a new simultaneous inversion method of atmospheric temperature and pressure based on lidar echo energy and the information contained in the RB spectrum. The accuracy and uncertainty of the proposed method are analyzed based on numerical simulations and atmospheric measurements and compared to state-of-the-art retrieval methods. It is shown that the accuracy of retrieved temperature can be improved from 2.0 to 1.1 K and one of the pressures from 1.2% to 0.8%. Furthermore, the potential of additionally retrieving wind speed and the aerosol extinction coefficient based on spectral characteristics and intensity of the scattered light is investigated and discussed. This lays a foundation for the future development and application lidar instruments capable of multiparameter retrieval.