A technical description of the Balloon Lidar Experiment (BOLIDE)

The Balloon Lidar Experiment (BOLIDE) was the first high-power lidar flown and operated successfully on board a balloon platform. As part of the PMC Turbo payload, the instrument acquired high-resolution backscatter profiles of polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) from an altitude of inline-formula∼ 38 km during its maiden inline-formula∼ 6 d flight from Esrange, Sweden, to northern Canada in July 2018. We describe the BOLIDE instrument and its development and report on the predicted and actual in-flight performance. Although the instrument suffered from excessively high background noise, we were able to detect PMCs with a volume backscatter coefficient as low as inline-formula $M3inlinescrollmathml\mathrm{normal\; 0.6}\times {\mathrm{normal\; 10}}^{-\mathrm{normal\; 10}}$ 55pt14ptsvg-formulamathimgdf9d4a1d5d2540cbe2c0de6741707a07 amt-13-5681-2020-ie00001.svg55pt14ptamt-13-5681-2020-ie00001.png  minline-formula⁻¹ srinline-formula⁻¹ at a vertical resolution of 100 inline-formulam and a time resolution of 30 inline-formulas.