Coments on “derivation of water vapor fluxes from lidar measurements” by W. E. Eichingeret al.

Eichingeret al. (1993) discuss the use of a Raman lidar for measurements of water vapor fluxes and suggest that the method is superior to the use of standard micrometeorological, point sensor measurements. Although the lidar shows considerable promise for some purposes, we believe that their criticisms of point sensors are not warranted; that there are difficulties with their application of dissipation techniques to extract fluxes; and that they misinterpret the existence of plume structures as statistically significant spatial variations of turbulent fluxes.