Effect of multiple scattering in the lidar measurement of tropospheric aerosol extinction profiles

This paper describes the lidar inversion of the tropospheric aerosol extinc tion profiles under the influence of multiple-scattering effects for variou s elevation angles of lidar detection. A single-scattering lidar equation i s employed to analyze lidar signals with multiple-scattering contributions that are calculated by the Monte Carlo method for given atmospheric conditi ons. We calculate errors in the optical thickness from the results with and without multiple-scattering effects. It is found that the errors vary, in a range of 2-18% according to the optical thickness variation of 0.19-3.8. The dependence of the error on the field-of-view angle of the lidar observa tion is also discussed.