Alan Robock¹, Minard Hall², John Barnes³ and Larry Thomason⁴

¹Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
²Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito, Ecuador
³NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory, Hilo, Hawaii
⁴NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia

We plan to build, install, and operate a lidar outside Quito, Ecuador, at latitude 0.0°, to monitor the vertical profile of stratospheric aerosols. Satellites provide the best instruments for producing global coverage, but existing and planned satellite missions all have limitations. Ground-based lidar observations are needed for calibration and validation of satellite observations, as well as for filling the gaps when satellite observations are not available. As there are no currently operating stratospheric lidars between 19° N and 23° S, with the exception of the one in Bandung, Indonesia (6.9° S, 107.6° E), which is plagued by bad weather, this lidar will fill an existing gap in ground-based monitoring of the next tropical volcanic eruption. It will serve as ground-truth for SAGE II, SAGE III, ACE, and other satellite aerosol observations. This station will serve as a prototype for a program of lidar observations in Latin America with coordinated observing and data processing protocols, including scheduling observations for every satellite overpass. These data will also be used as input for data assimilation calculations to produce a stratospheric aerosol data set needed to simulate the impact of volcanic eruptions on climate and ozone concentration.