Vertical wind profiles and backscatter measurements from the Met Office Halo Doppler Lidar unit 35 deployed at Netheravon, Wiltshire (51.241°N, -1.777°W, 120 m amsl) in southern England during the summer of 2023. Netheravon formed a supersite for the Wessex Summertime Convection Experiment (WesCon)/WesCon - Observing the Evolving Structures of Turbulence (WOEST) field campaign.
The Halo lidar is based on a 1565 nm laser emitting linearly polarized pulsed light through an 8 cm diameter lens with a heterodyne detector. Laser beam returns from the atmosphere are range-gated velocity and back-scattered power. The Halo is capable of full hemispheric scanning of the backscatter coefficient and radial velocity as a function of beam range.
The usual operation was vertical stares (zenith angle=0°) with periodic wind scans that invoked various options of off-axis views. DBS (Doppler beam swinging) scans used a tri-axis azimuthally orthogonal technique using the single lidar beam to retrieve horizontal mean wind components every 30 mins. Multi-axis VAD (velocity azimuth display) scans are a more involved version of the DBS scans and used 12 point off-zenith views performed every 60 mins. The vertical stares, DBS and VAD wind scans produced separate archived netCDF files.
Although depolarisation capability was possible with unit 35, this was switched off during WesCon.

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