Our study presents a new method, the solar background calibration method, which improves temperature determinations in rotational Raman lidar systems. By utilizing background solar radiation, this technique offers more continuous and reliable temperatures independent of external measuring instruments. This new method enhances our ability to monitor and understand atmospheric trends and their association with climate change with greater accuracy.

While it is relatively straightforward to automate the processing of lidar signals, it is difficult to automatically preprocess the measurements to distinguish between good and bad scans. It is easy to train humans to perform the task; however, considering the growing number of measurements, it is a time-consuming, on-going process. We have tested some machine learning algorithms for lidar signal classification and had success with both supervised and unsupervised methods.