Barely visible impact damage is one of the most common types of damage in carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer composite structures. This article investigates the potential of using ultrasonic guided Lamb waves to characterise the through thickness severity of barely visible impact damage in thin carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer structures. In the first step, a laser Doppler vibrometer was used to capture the full damage interaction of the wavefield excited by a piezoelectric actuator. Damage-scattered wavefield for four different severities were studied to find the best parameters for characterising the severity of damage. To reduce the overall acquisition time and size of data collected using the laser Doppler vibrometer, the measured signals were reconstructed from a singular broadband chirp response using a post-processing algorithm. From the full wavefield analysis obtained at a wide range of toneburst frequencies, the results showed that barely visible impact damage severity could be characterised using ultrasonic guided Lamb waves and that the 𝐴0 mode, dominant at lower frequencies, gave better results than the 𝑆0 mode. In the second step, the parameters for characterising the damage severity were applied to a sparse network of transducers as an in-service structural health monitoring methodology. The damage was successfully detected and located. In addition, the transducer path close to the predicted damage location was utilised to successfully quantify the damage severity based on the proposed damage index.