How to interpret the images:

The color jpegs shown here are time-versus range images of relative aerosol backscattering. The larger the value the stronger the backscatter. Backscatter is the intensity of laser light returned to the lidar systems telescope from small particles in the atmosphere. We adjust the color bar so that black, purple and blue colors indicate air that is relatively clean compared to colors of orange, red and white. Clouds are very strong scatterers and we usually adjust the color bar so they appear white in the images. The horizontal axis indicates increasing time to the right and the vertical axis is range (usually altitude in most cases).