  We demonstrate thermodynamic profile estimation with data obtained using the
MicroPulse DIAL such that the retrieval is entirely self contained. The only
external input is surface meteorological variables obtained from a weather
station installed on the instrument. The estimator provides products of
temperature, absolute humidity and backscatter ratio such that cross
dependencies between the lidar data products and raw observations are accounted
for and the final products are self consistent. The method described here is
applied to a combined oxygen DIAL, potassium HSRL, water vapor DIAL system
operating at two pairs of wavelengths (nominally centered at 770 and 828 nm).
We perform regularized maximum likelihood estimation through the Poisson Total
Variation technique to suppress noise and improve the range of the
observations. A comparison to 119 radiosondes indicates that this new
processing method produces improved temperature retrievals, reducing total
errors to less than 2 K below 3 km altitude and extending the maximum altitude
of temperature retrievals to 5 km with less than 3 K error. The results of this
work definitively demonstrates the potential for measuring temperature through
the oxygen DIAL technique and furthermore that this can be accomplished with
low-power semiconductor-based lidar sensors.
