This page presents Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) observations of canopy waves collected near Dixon, California, during the Canopy Horizontal Array Turbulance Study (CHATS) in the spring of 2007. The REAL observed fifty-two wave episodes during the three-month period of nearly continuous scanning. The nearly horizontal cross sectional lidar highpass filtered elastic backscatter intensity images and animations have been carefully examined for the presense of fine scale wave packets.

For a wave packet to be included in this study, it must have passed through the tower (located 1.6 km directly south of the lidar) and have a lifetime longer than one minute. Our subjective judgments of the coherence of the wave packets were based on the clear identification of crests and troughs and movement together as a group.

All cases occured during stable nightime conditions. These cases occured on 28 of the 86 nights during CHATS and only occured during stable nightime conditions. The internal waves have wavelengths ranging between 40 m and 100 m. The wave episode durations range from 1 min 43 sec to 1 hr 1 min 37 sec.