Abstract. The objective of this paper and its companion (Wing et al., 2018) is to show
that ground-based lidar temperatures are a stable, accurate, and precise
data set for use in validating satellite temperatures at high vertical
resolution. Long-term lidar observations of the middle atmosphere have been
conducted at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP), located in southern
France (43.93∘ N, 5.71∘ E), since 1978. Making use of
20 years of high-quality co-located lidar measurements, we have shown that
lidar temperatures calculated using the Rayleigh technique at 532 nm are
statistically identical to lidar temperatures calculated from the
non-absorbing 355 nm channel of a differential absorption lidar (DIAL)
system. This result is of interest to members of the Network for the
Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) ozone lidar community
seeking to produce validated temperature products. Additionally, we have
addressed previously published concerns of lidar–satellite relative warm bias
in comparisons of upper-mesospheric and lower-thermospheric (UMLT)
temperature profiles. We detail a data treatment algorithm which minimizes
known errors due to data selection procedures, a priori choices, and
initialization parameters inherent in the lidar retrieval. Our algorithm
results in a median cooling of the lidar-calculated absolute temperature
profile by 20 K at 90 km altitude with respect to the standard OHP
NDACC lidar temperature algorithm. The confidence engendered by the long-term
cross-validation of two independent lidars and the improved lidar temperature
data set is exploited in Wing et al. (2018) for use in multi-year satellite
validations.
Temperature climatology of the middle atmosphere from long-term lidar measurements at middle and low latitudes