Atmos. Chem. Phys., 17, 10051–10070, 2017 https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-10051-2017 © Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. PathfinderTURB: an automatic boundary layer algorithm. Development, validation and application to study the impact on in situ measurements at the Jungfraujoch Yann Poltera1,3, Giovanni Martucci1, Martine Collaud Coen1, Maxime Hervo1, Lukas Emmenegger2, Stephan Henne2, Dominik Brunner2, and Alexander Haefele1 1Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, Payerne, Switzerland 2Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland 3Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Correspondence to: Giovanni Martucci (
[email protected]) Received: 28 October 2016 – Discussion started: 23 January 2017 Revised: 7 June 2017 – Accepted: 6 July 2017 – Published: 28 August 2017 Abstract. We present the development of the Pathfinder- the time in summer and 21 % of the time in winter for a total TURB algorithm for the analysis of ceilometer backscatter of 97 days during the two seasons. The season-averaged daily data and the real-time detection of the vertical structure of cycles show that the CBL height reaches the JFJ only during the planetary boundary layer. Two aerosol layer heights are short periods (4 % of the time), but on 20 individual days in retrieved by PathfinderTURB: the convective boundary layer summer and never during winter. During summer in particu- (CBL) and the continuous aerosol layer (CAL). Pathfind- lar, the CBL and the CAL modify the air sampled in situ at erTURB combines the strengths of gradient- and variance- JFJ, resulting in an unequivocal dependence of the measured based methods and addresses the layer attribution problem absorption coefficient on the height of both layers.