REMOTE BIODETECTION PERFORMANCE OF A PULSED MONOSTATIC LIDAR SYSTEM

A monostatic pulsed lidar system called the laser cloud mapper was operated at the lidar range facility at the Defence Research Establishment Valcartier for 2 weeks during the autumn of 1990 to determine and assess its sensitivity for the remote detection of airborne biological organisms. The methodology called for the measurement of the depolarization of the lidar return signals that were backscattered from a biological aerosol cloud introduced into a large outdoor aerosol chamber. The test aerosol was produced by aerosolization of bacterial spores suspended in tap water; the relative concentration (by volume) of the bacterial material in tap water was varied from 1.0 to 0.001%. The detection performance of the laser cloud mapper is characterized through the ordered statistics of the depolarization ratio (e.g., sample distribution functions, quantile-quantile plots, and shift functions). In addition, a robust detection statistic based on the alpha-trimmed mean has been considered and the bootstrap-resampling method has been utilized to estimate uncertainties or confidence limits for this statistic. The receiver-operating characteristic curves of the laser cloud mapper (i.e., the probability of detection, P(D), versus the probability of false alarm, P(FA)) for both the empirical distribution function and the linearly thresholded, trimmed mean-level detectors are presented as a function of the source concentration of the test aerosol.