Full-day temperature Raman lidar developed by our School successfully deployed and applied at Zhongshan station, Antarctica

A full-day temperature Raman lidar, developed by the State Observatory for Atmospheric Remote Sensing at Wuhan, has been successfully deployed and applied at Zhongshan station, Antarctica. Dr. Fuchao Liu, a member from the Observatory, dominated the lidar system development. The relevant work was published recently in Optics Express with our School being the first author of the paper.
Temperature is a key parameter for describing the atmospheric state. It plays an extremely important role in various scientific researches such as weather analysis and prediction, climate change and assessment, atmospheric dynamics and chemistry. Moreover, it serves as necessary input for deducing other physical quantities in many remote sensing technologies. However, full-day remote sensing of atmospheric temperature with high precision and resolution still challenges.
Based on more than ten years of accumulated technical breakthrough made by the Observatory, the team undertook the full-day temperature Raman lidar development in 2019 in the project "Research and Development of Lidar Systems for Polar Middle and Low Atmosphere", a sub project in the National Key Research and Development Plan "Operational Monitoring and Research of Polar Atmosphere and Space Environment for Climate Change". The lidar received its field acceptance at Wuhan University in September 2019, and was deployed at Zhongshan Station in February 2020. Until now, the lidar has run for more than one year with good operational performance as well as stable and reliable data quality. The China Polar Research Center, the project leader, highly recognized the lidar consequently.

Filed working picture of the Raman lidar at Zhongshan Station, Antarctica

Currently, global warming is significantly influencing the global environment, weather and climate. The Polar Region is the most affected area by climate warming, presenting abnormal warming amplification effect due to its unique geographical features. Both the polar lower tropospheric warming and the polar stratospheric abnormal warming greatly affect the global ecological environment and human life. It is hence of great scientific value to monitor the structure and change of polar atmospheric temperature. The lidar, as the first lidar system deployed and applied in Antarctica and capable of detecting full-day tropospheric temperature, lays a strong foundation for China’s remote sensing of polar atmosphere.