by Robert Banks

Robert Banks, an ITaRS fellow at Barcelona, participated as co-author in a recent study presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The work (Lewis et al., 2015) combines efforts from NASA Goddard, UMBC JCET, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and the Technical University of Catalonia.

In the study, data from two permanent Micropulse Lidar Network (MPLNET) sites and five field deployed Micropulse lidar (MPL) systems are used to observe spatio-temporal variations in the daytime mixed-layer height. Data are collected from the 2011 DISCOVER-AQ (Deriving Information on Surface conditions from COlumn and VERtically resolved observations relevant to Air Quality) field campaign.

In general, better agreement is found between the lidar systems and ozonesondes at Beltsville than at Edgewood. Mixing-layer heights determined using two lidar-based algorithms (NASA MPL, grey circles and UPC EKF, magenta circles) show good agreement at the times of the ozonesonde (black circles) launches.