A vertical sounding of severe haze process in Guangzhou area

We detected a severe haze process in Guangzhou area with lidar and microwave radiometer, performed an inversion to get boundary layer height by wavelet covariance transform, and analyzed the correlation between meteorological factors of boundary layer and visibility from the perspective of dynamical and thermodynamic structures. Our results indicate that the boundary layer height shows significant daily changes, consistent with ground visibility variation. During the cleaning process, the boundary layer height exceeded 1 km; during severe haze, the height was only 500 m. Temperature gradient of 50–100 m, which was 30 h lag, was remarkably correlated with visibility, with the correlation coefficient of 0.77. High layer visibility (255 m) and low layer stability were significantly anticorrelation, and the maximum anticorrelation coefficient was up to ?0.76 in cleaning days and ?0.49 in haze days. In the related boundary layer meteorological factors, surface ventilation coefficient was linearly correlated with ground visibility, with the greatest correlation coefficient of 0.88. The correlation coefficients of boundary layer height, ground wind velocity, relative humidity and ground visibility were 0.76, 0.67, and ?0.77, respectively. There was a strong correlation between different meteorological factors. The dominant meteorological factor during this haze process was surface ventilation coefficient. In the area without boundary layer height sounding, ground visibility and wind velocity could be used to estimate boundary layer height.