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Dr. Artem Feofilov (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Paris) "Spaceborne lidar sounding of the atmosphere : advantages and challenges"

Dr. Artem Feofilov (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Paris) will deliver a talk on the topic "Spaceborne lidar sounding of the atmosphere : advantages and challenges"   in the IAP Colloquium in this winter semester 2021-22, on Wednesday, 8th Dec 2021 at 16:00. 
This interesting talk will focus on the aspects of clouds and how they play an important role in the energy budget of our planet. Cloud response to ongoing climate warming is the largest source of uncertainty for model-based estimates of climate sensitivity and, therefore, for predicting the evolution of future climate. 
Despite an excellent daily coverage and daytime/nighttime observation capability of space-borne infrared sounders, the height uncertainty of the cloud products retrieved from the observations performed by these instruments is large. This drawback does not exist for active sounders, which measure the altitude-resolved profiles of backscattered radiation with an accuracy on the order of 1−100 meters.
However, the wavelength, pulse energy, pulse repetition frequency, telescope diameter, orbit, detector, or optical filtering are not the same for any pair of instruments. These differences define the active instruments’ capability of detecting atmospheric aerosols and/or clouds for a given atmospheric situation and observation conditions (day, night, averaging distance). At the same time, there is an obvious need to ensure the continuity of global space-borne lidar measurements. In merging different satellite data, the difficulty is to build a multi-lidar record accurate enough to constrain predictions of how clouds evolve as climate warms. 
In this presentation, they will give an overview of currently operating and future space-borne lidars, discuss their advantages as well as technical and methodological challenges, and provide an outline of the approach for merging their records.