New Small Mobile Ozone Lidar instrument with extended capability for stratospheric ozone monitoring (SMOL-X)

In 2022-2023, the JPL Table Mountain Atmospheric Lidar Team developed several affordable, compact and automated mobile tropospheric ozone lidars (Small Mobile Ozone Lidar, or SMOL) that can be quickly deployed on the field for air quality studies and satellite validation (see companion abstract by Chouza et al.). Leveraging on technical and field deployment experience acquired with the SMOL instruments, a new system with extended capability was developed with the objective of measuring ozone throughout the lower and mid-stratosphere (up to 37 km) with a precision better than 10% for a time resolution of a few hours. The concept is similar to the SMOL systems, i.e., automated, compact, and affordable enough to deploy multiple units in a highly strategic and synergistic way. The performance of this new SMOL-X instrument will be presented, and several deployment configurations will be proposed in the context of the anticipated reduced spaceborne stratospheric ozone monitoring capability.