Cirrus climatological results from lidar measurements at OHP (44°N, 6°E)

Abstract

A climatology of cirrus clouds over the Observatoire de Haute Provence in France has been constructed from the analysis of ground‐based lidar measurements taken from 1997 to 1999. During this period the high‐resolution Rayleigh/Mie lidar collected 384 nights of measurements and cirrus profiles are observed in about half of these cases. We find subvisible cirrus (tau < 0.03) constitute ∼20% of cirrus cloud occurrences and that the mean thickness of a subvisible cirrus cloud layer is less than 1 km. A discussion of the error associated with these determinations is also presented.