Title:		Horizontal wind speed and direction profiles from Doppler lidar
Location:	Courtland Airport Site for Vortex-SE Meso18-19 Campaign
Lat/Lon:	34.659014 degN, -87.344131 degE
Date updated: 	27 July 2019
Contact: 	Dave Turner, NOAA (dave.turner@noaa.gov)
System:  	Halo Streamline lidar, which is part of the CLAMPS-1 facility
DOI:            https://doi.org/10.26023/1WEQ-QSQG-ZX0F

--- Background

Doppler lidars transmit pulses of 1.5 um wavelength laser energy into the atmosphere, which scatters off aerosol particles and hydrometeors.  The lidar measures the intensity of this return, as well as its radial velocity.  The lidar has a scanner which allows the system to scan anywhere in the hemisphere, and typically a fixed scan strategy is used.

These data were derived from plane-parallel-indicator (PPI) scans, which were collected approximately every 2 minutes.  In this scan, data were collected at 8 different azimuths each at 60 degrees elevation.  These data were processed using the velocity-azimuth-display (VAD) technique by Dave Turner.  The RMS field in the file indicates the goodness-of-fit to the assumed sine wave.  The field "maxht" indicates the maximum height that the data should be used.  Note that there are 1-sigma error bars on the lidar wind profiles.

This dataset was collected at the Courtland Airport in Alabama during the VORTEX-SE Meso18-19 field campaign.  This lidar is the Halo Streamline system, which is part of the Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS-1). 

Note: There is a large gap in the data between 29 Dec 2018 and 15 Jan 2019.  The lidar had frozen on the 29th, and due to the government shutdown it was not not noticed for several weeks.

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