Dataset for: Polarimetric lidar measurements of aquatic turbulence - laboratory experiment

This dataset contains the summary of turbulence measurements using polarimetric lidar in the water channel facility at the University of Southern California. The measurements were collected in a 17 m long flume tank with a heating element and turbulence generating grid. Depolarization rate and light attenuation coefficient for varying turbulent flow strength, particle concentration, and composition were determined using a polarimetric lidar system. The dataset includes a table with the summary of all the experiment runs (14) over 5 consecutive days. Each run was around 2.5 hours long. The first 30 minutes worth of data were excluded to ensure that particles were thoroughly mixed and the laser attained its nominal condition. Each run consisted of 80000 horizontal lidar profiles. The lidar returns over distances to the lidar detector for each profile were in the range from z = 0 to 13 m and had a 0.28 m resolution. The summary table includes the heater power, mean current speed, Turbulent Kinetic Energy Dissipation (TKED), temperature dissipation, light attenuation and depolarization at 532nm. We used polarimetric lidar constructed for the project by the JPL/NASA PI Gary Spiers. The polarimetric lidar used was a Minilite II laser (Continuum Lasers) with a 0.025 J/pulse transmitted pulse energy, a 4 ns pulse length 4 ns, a 10 s-1 pulse repetition rate and 532nm wavelength. A Rockland Int. microstructure profiler (VMP200) was used to measure turbulence.