Intercomparison of water vapor data measured with lidar during IHOP_2002. Part II: Airborne-to-airborne systems

The dataset of the International H2O Project (IHOP_2002) gives the first opportunity for direct inter-comparisons of airborne water vapor lidar systems and allows very important conclusions to be drawn for future field campaigns. Three airborne differential absorption lidar (DIAL) systems were operated simultaneously during some IHOP_2002 missions: the DIAL of Deutsches Zentrum fur Luftund Raumfahrt (DLR), the Lidar Atmospheric Sensing Experiment (LASE) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center, and the Lidar Embarque pour l'etude des Aerosols et des Nuages de l'interaction Dynamique Rayonnement et du cycle de l'Eau (LEANDRE II) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Data of one formation flight with DLR DIAL and LEANDRE II were investigated, which consists of 54 independent profiles of the two instruments measured with 10-s temporal average. For the height range of 1.14-1.64 km above sea level, a bias of (-0.41 +/- 0.16) g kg(-1) or -7.9% +/- 3.1% was found for DLR DIAL compared to LEANDRE II (LEANDRE II drier) as well as root-mean-square (RMS) deviations of (0.87 +/- 0.18) g kg(-1) or 16.9% +/- 3.5%. With these results, relative bias values of -9.3%, -1.5%, +2.7%, and +8.1% result for LEANDRE II, DLR DIAL, the scanning Raman lidar (SRL), and LASE, respectively, using the mutual bias values determined in Part I for the latter three sensors. From the three possible profile-to-profile intercomparisons between DLR DIAL and LASE, one case cannot provide information on the system performances due to very large inhomogeneity of the atmospheric water vapor field, while one of the two remaining two cases showed a difference of -4.6% in the height range of 1.4-3.0 km and the other of -25% in 1.3-3.8 km (in both cases DLR DIAL was drier than LASE). The airborne-to-airborne comparisons showed that if airborne water vapor lidars are to be validated down to an accuracy of better than 5% in the lower troposphere, the atmospheric variability of water vapor has to be taken into account down to scales of less than a kilometer unless a sufficiently large number of intercomparison cases is available to derive statistically solid biases and RMS deviations. In conclusion, the overall biases between the water vapor data of all three airborne lidar systems operated during IHOP_2002 are smaller than 10% in the present stage of data evaluation, which confirms the previous estimates of the instrumental accuracies for all the systems.