June 17, 2010
We scheduled a normal 8-hour run today while we were working on our projects. It was mostly clear skies all day, with lots of clouds around 6:00pm GMT, which required us to place a cloud cover over the mirror. You can see evidence of these clouds on the Range Corrected Backscatter graph below; they appear as small colorful blips around 18:00 GMT. We ran EARL from 11:56am GMT until 8:29pm GMT.
Between 15:00 and 18:00, the Background Subtracted graph had a lot of ups and downs, probably due to cloud activity. We recorded high cloud activity by 18:00, enough to require a cloud mask, but before then the clouds were spotty. The area of high vacillation on the Background Subtracted graph correlates with the area of higher backscatter on the Range-Corrected graph; this makes sense, considering they are the same variable, only with a range correction on the Range-Corrected graph. However, the Background Subtracted graph also corresponds with the depolarization signal on the Depolarization Ratio graph, which suggests a possible correlation between cloud activity and aerosol activities where the one might contain the other. A low-cloud and significant-depolarization signal correspondence is evident from other data sets of other days, as well. The drop in Background noise at 6:00pm GMT was due to the placement of a cloud mask upon the primary mirror and being left there for the duration of the data run.