Preliminary results from the new multiwavelength aerosol lidar scanning system in Turkey

Aerosols affect the radiation budget of the Earth by scattering and absorbing the incoming solar radiation, and by acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) to form clouds and/or change their properties. Because of their high spatio-temporal variability and remote nature, investigations of aerosols physical properties have been rather limited until the last few decades. Lately, multiwavelength Raman lidars became an important tool for the measurements of aerosol physical parameters. Such lidars allow to get three aerosol backscattering and two extinction coefficients (so called 3 beta+2 alpha) and from these optical data the particle microphysical parameters such as number, surface area and volume concentrations, effective radius, particle size distribution, particle and volume polarizations and complex refractive index can be retrieved through inversion with regularization, principle component analysis and linear estimation techniques.