Constraint Inversion Algorithm of Lidar Equation for Deriving Aerosol Optical Property

A key question of the backward integration algorithm to lidar equation is how to determine the far-end boundary value. This paper develops a Constraint Inversion Algorithm (CIA) for deriving the value and then the aerosol extinction profile from lidar signals, which uses the ground-level horizontal lidar signals as the constraint information. The smaller the wavelength is, the more sensitive to the variation of aerosol ex-tinction to backscatter ratio solved by CIA. According to the property an algorithm is further proposed to simultaneously retrieve the aerosol extinction profile, the size distribution and the imaginary part of its re-flective index from the multi-wavelength lidar observations. CIA is tested in the inversion simulations with satisfactory result.