Analysis of atmospheric lidar observations: some comments.

There have been many discussions of solutions to the lidar equation for elastic scattering (e.g., Fernald et al.,' Klett, 2 Davis, and Collis and Russell ). Most of these are simply variations on Hitschfeld and Bordan's5 solution for meteorological radars. Klett 2 recently restated this solution in a very convenient form for the analysis of lidar observations collected in very turbid atmospheres. His paper has prompted a restatement of the more general solution of Fernald et al.l which is also applicable to mildly turbid atmospheres where both aerosol and molecular scatterers must be considered in the analysis. This has led to a simple numerical scheme for the computer analysis of lidar measurements. The lidar equation for two distinct classes of scatters (Fernald et al.') is