The development of a three-beam aerosol backscatter correlation (ABC) light detection and ranging (lidar) to measure wind characteristics for wake vortex and plume tracking applications is discussed. This is a direct detection elastic lidar that uses three laser transceivers, operating at 1030-nm wavelength with ∼10-kHz pulse repetition frequency and nanosec class pulse widths, to directly obtain three components of wind velocities. By tracking the motion of aerosol structures along and between three near-parallel laser beams, three-component wind speed profiles along the field-of-view of laser beams are obtained. With three 8-in. transceiver modules, placed in a near-parallel configuration on a two-axis pan–tilt scanner, the lidar measures wind speeds up to 2 km away. Optical flow algorithms have been adapted to obtain the movement of aerosol structures between the beams. Aerosol density fluctuations are cross-correlated between successive scans to obtain the displacements of the aerosol features along the three axes. Using the range resolved elastic backscatter data from each laser beam, which is scanned over the volume of interest, a three-dimensional map of aerosol density can be generated in a short time span. The performance of the ABC wind lidar prototype, validated using sonic anemometer measurements, is discussed.
In this paper, we describe the development of a prototype differential absorption fluorescence lidar for nighttime tropospheric formaldehyde (H2CO) concentration profiling. H2CO has a strong absorption band in the 352-357nm region and fluoresces strongly in the 390-500nm region. Here, we obtain high sensitivity (∼0.1ppb) measurements of H2CO profiles from differential fluorescence signals obtained by injection seeding a Nd:YVO laser and tuning its wavelength on and off the peak of a strong absorption line. The fluorescence signal strength is further improved by using a multi-line bandpass filter whose pass-bands are aligned to multiple fluorescence peaks of H2CO. A H2CO filled photo-acoustic absorption cell is utilized for tuning the seed laser wavelength to the center of absorption line.
In this paper, we describe the development of a three-beam elastic lidar that utilizes aerosol backscatter correlation to measure three-component wind profiles for detecting and tracking aircraft wake vortices; turbulence intensity and wind shear profiles. High-resolution time-resolved wind information can currently be obtained with ultrasonic or hot-wire anemometers suitable for local point measurements, or with Doppler wind lidars that only measure line-of-sight wind speeds and have to be scanned over large measurement cone angles for obtaining three-component winds. By tracking the motion of aerosol structures along and between three near-parallel laser beams, our lidar obtains three-component wind speed profiles along the field of view (FOV) of the lidar beams. Our prototype lidar wind profiler (LWP) has three 8-inch transceiver modules placed in a near-parallel configuration on a two-axis pan-tilt scanner to measure winds up to 2km away. Passively q-switched near-infrared (1030nm) Yb:YAG lasers generate 12 - 18ns wide pulses at high repetition rate (about 10KHz) that are expanded and attenuated to eye-safe levels. Sensitive low noise detection is achieved even in daytime using a narrow FOV receiver, together with narrowband interference filters and single photoncounting Geiger-mode Si detectors. A multi-channel scaler retrieves the lidar return with 7.8ns bins (∼1.2m spatial resolution) and stores accumulated counts once every 50ms (20 profiles/sec). We adapted optical flow algorithms to obtain the movement of aerosol structures between the beams. The performance of our prototype LWP was validated using sonic anemometer measurements.
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