UW-Madison SSEC Lidar Wind Profiler for WiscoDISCO 21

Data from a doppler lidar wind profiler at the Chiwaukee Prairie, WI air monitoring site. There are two datastreams: chiwaukee_wind_profiles_YYYYMMDD.cdf and chiwaukee_stare_YYYYMMDD.cdf due to the way the data are collected. The lidar was programmed to carry out a vertical wind profile every 5 mins. In between, the lidar is staring vertically in zenith-pointing mode.  Therefore, there are two separate temporal resolutions.  The wind_profiles files contain wind speed, wind direction, vertical velocity, and signal-to-noise ratio. The data were thresholded at SNR == 0.008 during the processing, so that worse SNRs than that are not included. The stare files contain data on backscatter, vertical velocity, and intensity, with better representation of the vertical coordinate. 

Vertical velocity is given in each of the two datastreams. There are two ways to get at the vertical velocity:  one, as a direct measurement of the along-beam doppler velocity when it is in zenith mode, and two, as the residual in the calculation of the horizontal wind vector from the non-zenith stares at various azimuths.  The latter is convenient in that it represents the w component of the wind on the same time/height grid as the u and v components, but it is more temporally coarse than the vertical stare measurement.  

The wind profiles are processed using code developed by Rob Newsom (Dept of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Dave Turner (NOAA Earth Systems Research Lab) and used operationally at the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) sites throughout the world.