The Lidar-In-Space-Technology-Experiment (LITE) was flown on the STS-64 in September of 1994. LITE was the first lidar developed to fly in Earth's orbit and perform atmospheric studies. The LITE mission had three major objectives: validate instruments for operational spaceborne lidars, explore as many applications of spaceborne lidars as possible, and gather information on the range and variability of cloud, aerosol, and surface return signals for use in designing future systems.LITE used a Nd:YAG laser operating at three channels 1064 nm, 532 nm, and 355 nm to study Earth's lower atmosphere.
In this paper we use a single scatter lidar equation to investigate tropospheric and stratospheric aerosol and temperature measurements derived from the 355 and 532 nm channels. Temperature profiles of 355 nm channel were compared to coincident balloonsonde measurements between 5 and 40km. The results were discussed. The 355 nm channel temperature profiles were corrected for aerosol scattering using the 532 nm channel and an assumed Angstrom coefficient. The RMS between the corrected profiles and the balloonsonde data were computed.
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