Motivated by the urgent need for robust multiwavelength-Raman-polarization lidars that are easy to operate and allow aerosol typing, a portable lidar system, called PollyXT, has been developed at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) with international partners during the last decade (Althausen et al., 2009; Engelmann et al., 2015). The aim was to develop a sophisticated multiwavelength-Raman-polarization lidar for scientific purpose, but with the advantages of an easy-to-use and well-characterized instrument with same design, same automated operation, and same centralized data processing in line with the CIMEL Sun photometer of AERONET (Holben et al., 2001). These Polly systems have been developed for continuous, stand-alone operation in remote environments and were successfully deployed in the high northern latitudes of Finland (> 30 cm snow and < 20 °C, Hirsikko et al., 2014), in the rain forest of the Amazonian Basin with temperatures of > 30 °C and high relative humidity (Baars et al., 2012), and under permanent mechanical stress from motor vibrations plus rough sea aboard the research vessel Polarstern (Kanitz et al., 2013a).