Mariana Adam¹, Rasheen Connell¹, Demetrius Venable¹, David Whiteman², Belay Demoz², Everette Joseph¹

¹Howard University, Washington, DC 20059, USA
²NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA

The WAVES (Water Vapor Variability – Satellite/Sondes) 2006 field campaign took place at the Howard University Research Campus in Beltsville, MD from July 7 to August 10. The field campaign was intended to provide quality measurements of water vapor and ozone for comparison with AURA satellite retrievals and to quantify the air quality. Mainly, the operations include intensive observations by multiple radiosonde / ozonesonde sensors and several lidar systems during overpasses of the AURA satellite. The Howard University Raman Lidar (HURL) system operates at the third harmonic of an Nd:YAG laser and acquires data within three channels, at 354.7 nm (elastic backscatter and pure rotational Raman respectively), 386.7 nm and 407.5 nm (Raman scattering from nitrogen and water vapor molecules). The data acquisition is achieved with Licel Optical Transient Recorders which allow both photon counting and analog acquisition. The combination of both methods (“glue-ing”) gives maximum dynamic range. The present results show the temporal and spatial retrievals of the water vapor mixing ratio. The procedure to calculate the water vapor mixing ratio follows more or less the traditional techniques, with special attention on the incomplete overlap correction and estimation of the calibration constant. The water vapor mixing ratio profiles are compared with radiosondes profiles as well as with retrieved profiles by collocated NASA/GSFC Scanning Raman Lidar system.