AMTD Atmospheric Measurement Techniques Discussions AMTD Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss. 1867-8610 Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/amt-2017-395 EARLINET lidar quality assurance tools Freudenthaler Volker 1 Linné Holger 2 Chaikovski Anatoli 3 Rabus Dieter 1 5 Groß Silke https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7467-9269 1 4 Meteorologisches Institut der Ludwig–Maximilians–Universität, Munich, Germany Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany B.I. Stepanov Institute of Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus now at: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany retired 654169 03 01 2018 2018 1 35 Copyright: © 2018 Volker Freudenthaler et al. 2018 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://amt.copernicus.org/preprints/amt-2017-395/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://amt.copernicus.org/preprints/amt-2017-395/amt-2017-395.pdf

This paper describes the EARLINET quality assurance (QA) check-up tools for the hardware of lidars, developed in the recent years to monitor and improve the quality of the lidar systems and of their products. These check-up tools are the trigger-delay test, the Rayleigh-fit, the lidar test-pulse generator, the dark measurement, the telecover test, and the polarisation calibration.