Patricia successfully defended her dissertation on August 12, 2013.

TITLE:
Retrieval of optical and microphysical properties of aerosols from a hybrid lidar dataset

ABSTRACT:
Over the past decade the development of inversion techniques for the retrievals of aerosol microphysical properties (e.g. effective radius, volume and surface-area concentrations) and aerosol optical properties (e.g. complex index of refraction and single scattering albedo) from multiwavelength lidar system brought a new perspective in the study of the vertical distribution of aerosols. In this study retrievals of such parameters were obtained from a hybrid multiwavelength lidar dataset for the first time. In July of 2011, in the Baltimore-Washington DC region, synergistic profiling of optical and microphysical properties of aerosols with both airborne in-situ and ground-based remote sensing systems was performed during the first deployment of DISCOVER-AQ. The hybrid multiwavelength lidar dataset combines elastic ground-based measurements at 355 nm with airborne High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) measurements at 532 nm and elastic measurements at 1064 nm that were obtained up to 5 km apart of each other. This was the first study in which optical and microphysical retrievals from lidar were obtained during the day and directly compared to AERONET and in-situ measurements. Good agreement was observed between lidar and AERONET retrievals. Larger discrepancies were observed between lidar retrievals and in-situ measurements obtained by the aircraft and aerosol hydration processes that were not taken into account in the study are believed to be the cause for the discrepancies observed.