Evaluation of the new DWD ozone and temperature lidar during the Hohenpeißenberg Ozone Profiling Study (HOPS) and comparison of results with previous NDACC campaigns

A newly upgraded German Weather Service (DWD) ozone and temperature lidar (HOH) located at the Hohenpeisenberg Meteorological Observatory (47.8° N, 11.0° E) has been evaluated through comparison with the travelling standard lidar operated by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA STROZ), satellite overpasses from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER), the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS), meteorological radiosondes launched from Munchen (65 km north-east), and locally launched ozonesondes. The blind evaluation was conducted under the framework of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) using 10 clear nights of measurements in 2018 and 2019. This campaign was conducted within the larger context of NDACC validation activities for European lidar stations. The previous 2017–2018 validation campaign took place at the French Observatoire de Haute Provence and and showed a high degree of fidelity between participating instruments. The results are reported in the companion article (Wing et al., 2020). There was good agreement between all ozone lidar measurements in the range of 15 to 41 km with relative differences between co-located ozone profiles of less than ±10 %. Differences in the measured ozone numbers densities between the lidars and the locally launched ozone sondes were also generally less than 5 % below 30 km. The satellite ozone profiles demonstrated some differences with respect to the ground based lidars which are due to sampling differences and geophysical variation. Temperatures differences for all instruments were less than ±5 K below 60 km, with larger differences present in the lidar-satellite comparisons above this region. Temperature differences between the lidars met the NDACC accuracy requirements of ±1 K between 17 and 78 km. The NASA lidar exhibited slightly colder temperatures, between 5 and 10 K, than the other instruments below 20 km and slightly warmer temperatures, 5 to 10 K, above 70 km. These differences are likely due to algorithm initialisation choices and photon count saturation corrections.