Summary
Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) are a ubiquitous wide-spread optical phenomena of the polar summer mesopause region, and comprise icy aerosols that form under the influence of large-scale atmospheric ascent and adiabatic cooling. PMC aerosols are controlled by the thermal, chemical and dynamical environment of the mesopause region, and provide an important tracer to test our understanding of the processes and climate of this sensitive and complex atmospheric region. Space-based solar backscatter instruments are providing important information on the occurrence and extent of PMC in both hemispheres, but because of their viewing geometry these instruments provide only limited information on the vertical height of the clouds. Ground-based lidars can provide good vertical location of the clouds from specific sites, however logistical difficulties have meant that relatively little lidar data for PMCs have so far been collected in the Southern Hemisphere (SH). Intercomparison of the space- and ground-based measurements provided a means of examining the sensitivity of the methods, and this is particularly important in the case of the SH for satellite instruments, where the albedo of the underlying Antarctic surface is distinctly different to that of the Arctic. In this paper we examine the database of PMC detections obtained with a Rayleigh lidar at Australia’s Davis station (68.6S, 78.0E) over the period 2001-2009 and evaluate measurement coincidences with solar backscatter observations by the OMI instrument on the Aura spacecraft, and the OSIRIS instrument on the Odin spacecraft. We present a statistical analysis of PMC brightness using different spatial and temporal coincidence criteria, and comment on the sensitivity of the detection methods.