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instruments:ceilo:ceilometer

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Ceilometer CT25K

Mentor: S. Steinke.

Principle

A ceilometer measures the cloud base height, i.e. the ceiling in aviation. It is based on the light detecting and ranging (LIDAR) principle, i.e. it sends laser pulses and measures the backscattered light. From travel time the distance of the back scattering object can be determined. From strength and attenuation of the backscattered signal the backscatter coefficient is determined. The instrument identifies cloud bases by the strong increase of the backscatter coefficient. If the lower clouds are transparent it can detect up to three distinct cloud layers. We use the backscatter profile for an estimate of boundary layer height.

Instrument

ceilo_tophat.jpg
Current setup at Research Center Jülich on the roof of IEK-8: on the left hand side the RPG HATPRO-TOPHAT, on the right hand side the Vaisala CT25K ceilometer.

Data

  • If you are interested in receiving data please contact the instrument mentors: S. Steinke

Current data:

<html> <a href=“http://gop.meteo.uni-koeln.de/~hatpro/jue/ceilo/current/index.html” target=“_blank”> <img src=“http://gop.meteo.uni-koeln.de/~hatpro/jue/ceilo/current/bscat.png” width=420> </a> click to enlarge </html>

History

Period Place Project
10/2010 - today Research Center Jülich, Germany
summer months 2007-2010 Selhausen, Germany TR32
winter months 2007 - 2010 UFS, Zugspitze, Germany TOSCA
2006 - 2007 Nangatchori, Benin AMMA

Specifications

See manual section 1.2.6 page 8 and section 5.2.2 page 56.

Parameter Specification
Wavelength 905 nm
Pulse Power 16 W typical
Pulse energy 1.6μJ ±20%1)
Average Power 8.9 mW
Pulse Width 100 ns
Repetition Rate: 5.57 kHz
Number of pulses: 65,5362)
Range resolution 50ft = 30m (see here)
Time resolution 15sec
Range 0…25,000 ft. (0…7.5 km)
Laser Divergence ± 0.53×0.75 mrad (edge×diagonal3))
Field-of-View Divergence ± 0.66 mrad
Telescope diameter 145mm
Size 760 x 280 x 245 mm
Power Consumption 365 W
Weight 40 kg
1)
factory adjustment
2)
65,536=2^16
3)
the laser is a diode with square shape. The beam thus a pyramid with different opening angles for neighbouring and opposite edges
instruments/ceilo/ceilometer.1415789845.txt.gz · Last modified: 2016/04/07 19:53 (external edit)