Lidar polarization measurements of PMCs

System effects and detection schemes are considered for the case of polar mesospheric cloud (PMC) depolarization measurements. The ability of the ARCLITE lidar in Greenland to perform these estimates is improved through polarized solar background rejection, polarization hardware compensation and software correction to collected parallel and perpendicular polarized data. Through these processes we achieve shot noise limited resolution with no system bias. We also determine that a factor of 10 improvement in SNR is needed to achieve PMC depolarization resolution less than 1% on the ARCLITE lidar.