Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) Doppler Lidar & Derived Products

This repository contains all processed Doppler‐lidar outputs from the PSU lidar deployed for the Baltimore Social‐Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) project.
Vertical Stare Scans (fixed‐beam, vertical profiling): 1 Hz backscatter intensity (m⁻¹ sr⁻¹), signal‐to‐noise ratio (unitless), and Doppler vertical‐velocity (m s⁻¹) on 30 m range gates (and 3 m range gates), stored as CF-compliant NetCDF.
Wind Profiles (horizontal‐wind retrieval): daily NetCDF outputs of retrieved horizontal wind speed (m s⁻¹) and direction (degrees), computed from the angled‐scan returns.
Profile Statistics (summary statistics on the vertical velocity): 15 min windows (default) of mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis, high-frequency variance, etc., as a function of height; saved as CF-compliant NetCDF files.
Boundary Layer Height (BLH) (fuzzy-logic output): 15 min BLH estimates (m), with lower/upper fuzzy bounds (m) and a quality flag (0–4) indicating data status (e.g., no data, good, ran out of signal, below range, cloud-topped).
Cloud Base Height (Haar-gradient detection): 10 min estimates of cloud-base height (m).
All five product streams are organized by year and date under their own top-level folders (01_Vertical_Stare_Scans/ through 05_Cloud_Height/). Each folder contains a data_<type>/YYYY/ subdirectory with daily CF-compliant NetCDF outputs (96 windows per day at 15 min intervals). Global attributes in each file include creation history, version (3.0.0), institution, and source.
Instrument & MeasurementsThe PSU Doppler Lidar samples aerosol backscatter (m⁻¹ sr⁻¹), signal-to-noise ratio, and radial velocity at ~1 Hz. Vertical stare scans point the beam straight up; after collecting angled scans through multiple elevation angles, the "Wind Profiles" product contains the fully retrieved horizontal wind speed and direction. Data were collected continuously at ~30 m range resolution (and 3 m for the year of 2025), with a typical height ceiling of ~12 km.
How to Use
Open any NetCDF with Python's xarray, MATLAB, or similar CF-compliant tools.
Stare scans and angled-scan retrievals (Wind Profiles) are CF-compliant daily NetCDF files.
Profile-Statistics, BLH, and Cloud Height files are daily 15 min (10 min for Cloud Heights) summaries (96 time steps per file).
Inspect the included variables (e.g., vertical_velocity_variance, wind_speed, BLH, cloud_base_height) for your analyses.
Use the quality flags (BLH_flag, cloud_flag) to filter out poor-quality retrievals.
For more information or questions about processing methods, please contact:Nicholas E. Prince ⟨[e-mail]⟩Penn State Department of Meteorology & Atmospheric Science