Solar surface irradiance (SSI) estimations inferred from satellite images are essential to gain a comprehensive understanding of the solar resource, which is crucial in many fields. This study examines the recent data-driven methods for inferring SSI from satellite images and explores their strengths and weaknesses. The results suggest that while these methods show great promise, they sometimes dramatically underperform and should probably be used in conjunction with physical approaches.

Weather forecasters around the world use uncrewed balloons to measure wind and temperature for their weather models. In these measurements, wind is recorded from the shift of the balloon by the moving air. However, the balloons and the measurement devices also move by themselves in still air. This creates artificial wind measurements that are normally removed from the data. We show new techniques to avoid these movements and increase the altitude resolution of the wind measurement by 6 times.

The study examines methane enhancements inferred from hyperspectral imaging observations using different retrieval schemes. One of the core challenges is the high spatial and moderate spectral resolution as it makes separation of spectral variations caused by molecular absorption and surface reflectivity challenging. It was found that localized methane enhancements can be detected and quantified from HySpex airborne observations using various retrieval schemes.

We compared 2 years of wind measurements by the Aeolus satellite with winds from two wind-profiler radars in Arctic Sweden and coastal Antarctica. Biases are similar in magnitude to results from other locations. They are smaller than in earlier studies due to more comparison points and improved criteria for data rejection. On the other hand, the standard deviation is somewhat higher because of degradation of the Aeolus lidar.

Air quality models are key in understanding complex air pollution processes and assist in developing strategies to mitigate the impacts of air pollution. The ability of regional air quality models to skilfully represent pollutant distributions aloft is important to enabling their skilful prediction at the surface. To assist in model development and evaluation, a long-term, quality-assured dataset of the 3-D distribution of key pollutants was collected over the United Kingdom (2019–2022).

Over a period of 5 d, a photoacoustic methane sensor was compared with a Picarro cavity ring-down (G2301) spectrometer. Both devices measured the ambient methane concentration at the meteorological observatory Hohenpeißenberg. Cross-sensitivities on the photoacoustic signal, due to fluctuating ambient humidity, were compensated by applying the CoNRad algorithm. The results show that photoacoustic sensors have the potential for accurate and precise greenhouse gas monitoring.

Measurements from the EarthCARE satellite mission will be used to retrieve profiles of cloud and aerosol properties. These retrievals are combined with auxiliary information about surface properties and atmospheric state, e.g., temperature and water vapor. This information allows computation of 1D and 3D solar and thermal radiative transfer for small domains, which are compared with coincident radiometer observations to continually assess EarthCARE retrievals.

Uncertainties remain great in the planetary boundary layer height (PBLH) determination from radiosonde, especially during the transition period of different PBL regimes. We combine seven existing methods along with statistical modification on gradient-based methods. We find that the ensemble method can eliminate the overestimation of PBLH and reduce the inconsistency between individual methods. The ensemble method improves the effectiveness of PBLH determination to 62.6 %.

Different methods for the calculation of nucleation spectra from drop-freezing experiments are discussed as the choice of data processing reflects on underlying principles.

We report the lidar inter-comparison results with a reference lidar at 1064 nm, in order to homogenize the signals provided by different lidar systems for establishing a lidar network in China. The profiles of relative deviation of lidar signals are less than 5 % within 500–2000 m and 10 % within 2000–5000 m, increasing confidence in the reliability of the signals provided by each lidar system in the channels at 1064 nm for a future lidar network in China.