The Airborne Mobile Aerosol Lidar (AMALi) is an instrument developed at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research for a trouble-free operation under the challenging weather conditions at the Earth's polar regions. Since 2003 the AMALi has been successfully deployed for measurements in the ground-based installation and the zenith- or nadir-aiming airborne configurations during several scientific campaigns in the Arctic. The lidar provides profiles of the total backscatter at two wavelengths, from which aerosol and cloud properties are derived. It measures also the linear depolarization of the backscattered return, allowing for the discrimination of thermodynamic cloud phase and the identification of the presence of non-spherical aerosol particles. This paper presents the capability characteristics and performance of the past and present state of the AMALi system, as well as discusses the ground-based and airborne evaluation schemes applied to invert the data.