On the use of SODAR data to estimate mixing height

Estimation of the mixing height is one of the most common applications of SODAR data for more than twenty years and SODAR has been shown to provide reliable results under a great variety of meteorological and site conditions. Nevertheless there are still some unsolved questions. The paper gives a brief review of results obtained during the last two decades. Additionally some of the open problems are discussed in more detail. These are the determination of the stable boundary layer height from digitized SODAR data, its relation to other common height scales, its parameterization, and finally the estimation of the height of a deep convective boundary layer, exceeding the SODAR probing range.