It is known that the retrieval of aerosol extinction and backscatter coefficients from lidar data acquired through so-called total-power channelsintended to measure the backscattered power irrespective of the polarizationcan be adversely affected by varying depolarization effects produced by the aerosol under measurement. This effect can be particularly noticeable in advanced multiwavelength systems, where different wavelengths are separated using a system of dichroic beam splitters, because in

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... general the reflection and transmission coefficients of the beam splitters will be different for fields with polarization parallel or perpendicular to the incidence plane. Here we propose a setup for multiwavelength aerosol lidars alleviating diattenuation effects due to changing depolarization conditions while allowing measure linear depolarization. I