Trade-wind clouds and aerosols characterized by airborne horizontal lidar measurements during the EUREC ⁴A field campaign

From 23 January to 13 February 2020, 20 manned research flights were conducted over the tropical Atlantic, off the coast of Barbados (inline-formula $M2inlinescrollmathml\mathrm{normal\; 13}{}^{\circ }{\mathrm{normal\; 30}}^{\prime }$ 34pt11ptsvg-formulamathimg8b083db7ecad663263f5a1024837f7aa essd-12-2919-2020-ie00001.svg34pt11ptessd-12-2919-2020-ie00001.png  N, inline-formula $M3inlinescrollmathml\mathrm{normal\; 58}{}^{\circ }{\mathrm{normal\; 30}}^{\prime }$ 34pt11ptsvg-formulamathimge9feb9dba187ec6747217c6717372cf0 essd-12-2919-2020-ie00002.svg34pt11ptessd-12-2919-2020-ie00002.png  W), to characterize the trade-wind clouds generated by shallow convection. These flights were conducted as part of the international EURECinline-formula⁴A (Elucidating the role of cloud–circulation coupling in climate) field campaign. One of the objectives of these flights was to characterize the trade-wind cumuli at their base for a range of meteorological conditions, convective mesoscale organizations and times of the day, with the help of sidewards-staring remote sensing instruments (lidar and radar). This paper presents the datasets associated with horizontal lidar measurements. The lidar sampled clouds from a lateral window of the aircraft over a range of about 8 km, with a horizontal resolution of 15 m, over a rectangle pattern of 20 km by 130 km. The measurements made possible the characterization of the size distribution of clouds near their base and the presence of dust-like aerosols within and above the marine boundary layer. This paper presents the measurements and the different levels of data processing, ranging from the raw Level 1 data (https://doi.org/10.25326/57https://doi.org/10.25326/57; Chazette et al., 2020c) to the Level 2 and Level 3 processed data that include a horizontal cloud mask (https://doi.org/10.25326/58https://doi.org/10.25326/58; Chazette et al., 2020b) and aerosol extinction coefficients (https://doi.org/10.25326/59https://doi.org/10.25326/59; Chazette et al., 2020a). An intermediate level, companion to Level 1 data (Level 1.5), is also available for calibrated and geolocalized data (https://doi.org/10.25326/57https://doi.org/10.25326/57; Chazette et al., 2020c).