Coherent Doppler lidar system for airborne measurement: a ground-based experiment of atmospheric wind profiling

An eyes-safe, airborne, coherent Doppler lidar (CDL) system has been developed at the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL). It consists of a 2-mum laser transmitter, a receiver, a heterodyne detector, a scanning device, and signal processing equipments. The main objective of the development of this CDL system is to demonstrate the feasibility of CDL from a moving platform. The second objective is to develop a computational algorithm for calculating wind velocity and wind direction. The performance of the CDL was evaluated by a ground-based experiment on wind profiling. That is, zonal, meridional, and vertical wind profiles were obtained by the CDL and by the velocity-azimuth display (VAD) technique with a height resolution of 150 in for every 20 minutes. These profiles were compared with the wind profiles measured by the WindProfiler (WP) installed at CRL. Although the temporal and vertical resolution measured by the CDL differed slightly from that by the WP, the calculated horizontal wind velocity measured by the CDL corresponded well with the WP calculations. It is thus concluded that the developed computational algorithm provides valid calculations of wind velocity.