Monitoring aerosol distribution from ground based elastic scattering lidar: a review

The original lidars were incoherent elastic backscatter systems, and one of the original applications for such systems was profiling the vertical distribution of aerosol. In the beginning there was significant limitation in both the practicality of the lidar hardware and in using data for aerosol retrievals of significant parameters such as the aerosol extinction and backscatter cross section. The paper reviews the use of lidars for remote sensing of atmospheric aerosols.