Comparative study of lidars for measuring atmospheric temperature and wind

Abstract

The uncertainty of lidar measured atmospheric temperature T or line-of-sight (LOS) wind V is inversely proportional to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received photocounts. We term the proportionality constant, which depicts the efficacy of the measurement method, the single-photon (or unity SNR) measurement uncertainty for T and/or V measurement. In this study, we use the single-photon measurement uncertainty as the figure of merit to compare and understand the practical differences between Cabannes scattering (CS), Rayleigh inversion (RI), rotational Raman (RR), and laser induced fluorescence (LIF) lidars for atmospheric temperature and wind measurements, and to optimize the choice and receiver design of a lidar system for a potential application.