Comparison of Antarctic polar stratospheric cloud observations by ground-based and space-borne lidar and relevance for chemistry-climate models

A statistical approach has been used to compare ground-based and satellite-based observations, since point-to-point comparison is often troublesome due to the intrinsic differences in the observation geometries and the imperfect over-lap of the observed areas.

A comparison of polar stratospheric cloud (PSC) occurrence from 2006 to 2010 is presented, as observed from the ground-based lidar station at McMurdo (Antarctica) and by the satellite-borne CALIOP lidar (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) measuring over McMurdo. McMurdo (Antarctica) is one of the primary lidar stations for aerosol measurements of the NDACC (Network for Detection of Atmospheric Climate Change). The ground-based observations have been classified with an algorithm derived from the recent v2 detection and classification scheme, used to classify PSCs observed by CALIOP.