A New Approach to Inverting and De-Noising Backscatter from Lidar Observations

Abstract

Atmospheric lidar observations provide a unique capability to directly observe the vertical profile of cloud and aerosol scattering properties and have proven to be an important capability for the atmospheric science community. For this reason NASA and ESA have put a major emphasis on developing both space and ground based lidar instruments. Measurement noise (solar background and detector noise) has proven to be a significant limitation and is typically reduced by temporal and vertical averaging. This approach has significant limitations as it results in significant reduction in the spatial information and can introduce biases due to the non-linear relationship between the signal and the retrieved scattering properties. This paper investigates a new approach to de-noising and retrieving cloud and aerosol backscatter properties from lidar observations that leverages a technique developed for medical imaging to de-blur and de-noise images; the accuracy is defined as the error between the true and inverted photon rates. Hence non-linear bias errors can be mitigated and spatial information can be preserved.