The NASA airborne High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) has been deployed on board the NASA Langley Research Center's B200 aircraft to several locations in North America from 2006 to 2012 to aid in characterizing aerosol properties for over fourteen field missions. Measurements of aerosol extinction (532 nm), backscatter (532 and 1064 nm), and depolarization (532 and 1064 nm) during 349 science flights, many in coordination with other participating research aircraft, satellites, and ground sites, constitute a diverse data set for use in characterizing the spatial and temporal distribution of aerosols, as well as properties and variability of the Mixing Layer (ML) height. We describe the use of the HSRL data collected during these missions for computing ML heights and show how the HSRL data can be used to determine the fraction of aerosol optical thickness within and above the ML, which is important for air quality assessments. We describe the spatial and temporal variations in ML heights found in the diverse locations associated with these experiments. We also describe how the ML heights derived from HSRL have been used to help assess simulations of Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) derived using various models, including the Weather Research and Forecasting Chemistry (WRF-Chem), NASA GEOS-5 model, and the ECMWF/MACC models
