ALBERT

Notes: Abstract We report on the development and current capabilities of the ALOMAR Rayleigh/Mie/Raman lidar. This instrument is one of the core instruments of the international ALOMAR facility, located near Andenes in Norway at 69°N and 16°E. The major task of the instrument is to perform advanced studies of the Arctic middle atmosphere over altitudes between about 15 to 90 km on a climatological basis. These studies address questions about the thermal structure of the Arctic middle atmosphere, the dynamical processes acting therein, and of aerosols in the form of stratospheric background aerosol, polar stratospheric clouds, noctilucent clouds, and injected aerosols of volcanic or anthropogenic origin. Furthermore, the lidar is meant to work together with other remote sensing instruments, both ground- and satellite-based, and with balloon- and rocket-borne instruments performing in situ observations. The instrument is basically a twin lidar, using two independent power lasers and two tiltable receiving telescopes. The power lasers are Nd:YAG lasers emitting at wavelengths 1064, 532, and 355 nm and producing 30 pulses per second each. The power lasers are highly stabilized in both their wavelengths and the directions of their laser beams. The laser beams are emitted into the atmosphere fully coaxial with the line-of-sight of the receiving telescopes. The latter use primary mirrors of 1.8 m diameter and are tiltable within 30° off zenith. Their fields-of-view have 180 μrad angular diameter. Spectral separation, filtering, and detection of the received photons are made on an optical bench which carries, among a multitude of other optical components, three double Fabry-Perot interferometers (two for 532 and one for 355 nm) and one single Fabry-Perot interferometer (for 1064 nm). A number of separate detector channels also allow registration of photons which are produced by rotational-vibrational and rotational Raman scatter on N2 and N2+O2 molecules, respectively. Currently, up to 36 detector channels simultaneously record the photons collected by the telescopes. The internal and external instrument operations are automated so that this very complex instrument can be operated by a single engineer. Currently the lidar is heavily used for measurements of temperature profiles, of cloud particle properties such as their altitude, particle densities and size distributions, and of stratospheric winds. Due to its very effective spectral and spatial filtering, the lidar has unique capabilities to work in full sunlight. Under these conditions it can measure temperatures up to 65 km altitude and determine particle size distributions of overhead noctilucent clouds. Due to its very high mechanical and optical stability, it can also employed efficiently under marginal weather conditions when data on the middle atmosphere can be collected only through small breaks in the tropospheric cloud layers.

Notes: Abstract In this paper, we consider the unsteady free convection boundary layer flow which is induced by time-periodic variations in the surface temperature of a vertical surface embedded in a porous medium. The basic steady flow is that of a power-law distribution where the surface temperature varies as the nth power of the distance from the leading edge. Small-amplitude time-periodic disturbances are added to this basic distribution. Both the low- and high-frequency limits are considered separately, and these are compared with a full numerical solution obtained by using the Keller-box method. Attention is restricted to the cases n≤1; when n=1, the flow is locally self-similar for any prescribed frequency of modulation.

Notes: Summary We present an, account of the linear instability of Darcy-Boussinesq convection in a uniform, unstably stratified porous layer at arbitrary inclinations α from the horizontal. A full numerical solution of the linearized disturbance equations is given and the detailed graphical results used to motivate various asymptotic analyses. A careful study shows that at large Rayleigh numbers two-dimensional instability can only arise when α≤31.30°. However it is also demonstrated that the maximum inclination below which this instability may be possible is the slightly greater value of 31.49° which corresponds to a critical Rayleigh number of 104.30.