Balloon Lidar Experiment (BOLIDE) data from PMC Turbo balloon mission Mission name: PMC-Turbo Instrument: BOLIDE PI/Provider name: Bernd Kaifler, bernd.kaifler@dlr.de Institute: Institute of Atmospheric Physics, German Aerospace Center (DLR) Contact info: bernd.kaifler@dlr.de Web site: http://www.pa.op.dlr.de/ma-lidar/bolide/ Data Directory: This directory gathers data for the BOLIDE lidar instrument that flew on the PMC Turbo balloon that was launched on 7 July 2018 from Esrange, Sweden and landed in Nunavut, Canada on 14 July 2018. The mission was designed to study small-scale atmospheric dynamics at the polar mesospheric cloud layer at ~82 km altitude. The lidar data represents volume backscatter coefficients of polar mesospheric clouds, available at high-resolution of 20 m vertical and 10 s temporal resolution, from one compressed netcdf file. The magnitude of volume backscatter coefficients scales with the brightness of clouds imaged by the PMC Turbo cameras also available from the SPDF. The netcdf file further includes floating altitude, rotator angle (azimuth) as well as latitude and longitude of the lidar beam at 82 km altitude. The data cover 5.9 days of float. References: Kaifler, B., Rempel, D., Roßi, P., Büdenbender, C., Kaifler, N., and Baturkin, V.: A technical description of the Balloon Lidar Experiment (BOLIDE), Atmos. Meas. Tech., 13, 5681–5695, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-5681-2020, 2020. Fritts, D. C., Miller, A. D., Kjellstrand, C. B., Geach, C., Williams, B. P., Kaifler, B., et al. (2019). PMC Turbo: Studying gravity wave and instability dynamics in the summer mesosphere using polar mesospheric cloud imaging and profiling from a stratospheric balloon. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 124, 6423– 6443. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD030298 A data description will be submitted to the journal Earth System Science Data. Users are encouraged to contact us for early discussion of analysis projects and to offer co-authorship when publishing results derived from BOLIDE data. Please acknowledge the NASA Space Physics Data Facility for data usage. Keywords: lidar, polar mesospheric clouds, noctilucent clouds, mesosphere, balloon Data publishing time: 1 Feb 2021 Data contact: natalie.kaifler@dlr.de