Raman LIDAR for UHECR experiments: an overview of the L’Aquila (Italy) lidar station experience for the retrieval of quality-assured data

¹ CETEMPS and INFN, Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche e Chimiche, Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, via Vetoio, 67100, L’Aquila, Italy
² Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Istituto di Metodologie per l’Analisi Ambientale (CNR-IMAA), Contrada S. Loja – Zona Industriale, 85050 Tito Scalo (Potenza), Italy
³ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Meteorologisches Institut Experimentelle Meteorologie, Munich, Germany
⁴ Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

^* Corresponding author: marco.iarlori@aquila.infn.it

Published online: 17 May 2017

Abstract

L’Aquila (Italy) lidar station is part of the EARLINET (European Aerosol Research Lidar Network) since its beginning in the 2000. In the EARLINET community great efforts are devoted to the quality-assurance of the aerosol optical properties inserted in the database. To this end, each lidar station performed intercomparisons with reference instruments, a series of internal hardware checks in order to assess the quality of their instruments and exercises to test the algorithms used to retrieve the aerosol optical parameters. In this paper we give an overview of our experience within EARLINET qualityassurance (QA) program, which was adopted for the Raman lidar (RL) operated in the AUGER Observatory. This program could be systematically adopted for the lidar systems needed for the current and upcoming UHECR experiments, like CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array).