The Ti:sapphire (TISA) laser transmitter of the mobile, three-dimensional-scanning water-vapor differential absorption lidar (DIAL) of the University of Hohenheim is described in detail. The dynamically-stable, unidirectional ring resonator contains a single Brewster-cut TISA crystal, which is pumped from both sides with 250 Hz using a diode-pumped frequency-doubled Nd:YAG laser. The resonator is injection seeded and actively frequency-stabilized using a phase-sensitive technique. The TISA laser is operating near 820 nm, which is optimum for ground-based water-vapor DIAL measurements. An average output power of up to 6.75 W with a beam quality factor of M2<2 is reached. The pointing stability is <13 μrad (rms), the depolarization <1%. The overall optical-optical conversion efficiency is up to 19%. The pulse length is 40 ns with a pulse linewidth of <157 MHz. The short- and long-term frequency stabilities are 10 MHz (rms). A spectral purity of 99.9% was determined by pointing to a stratus cloud in low-elevation scanning mode with a cloud bottom height of ≈2.4 km.
The potential use of non-dispersive infrared spectroscopy for measuring delta(13)C in air is demonstrated. This technique has already been successfully established for breath test analyses in medical diagnostics, where the CO(2) concentration ranges from 1 to 5 vol.% in the exhaled breath of vertebrates. For breath tests, the sensitivity and accuracy has been improved to reach a standard deviation of 0.2 per thousand (delta-value). Further adjustments were necessary to improve the sensitivity of the instrument at concentration levels typical of atmospheric air. The long-term stability is given by a standard deviation of 0.35 per thousand for CO(2) concentrations of about 400 ppm with signal averaging over 60 s.
A ground-based, integrated path, differential absorption light detection and ranging (IPDA LIDAR) system is described and characterized for a series of nighttime studies of CO2, CH4, and H2O. The transmitter is based on an actively stabilized, continuous-wave, single-frequency external-cavity diode laser (ECDL) operating from 1.60 to 1.65 μm. The fixed frequency output of the ECDL is microwave sideband tuned using an electro-optical phase modulator driven by an arbitrary waveform generator and filtered using a confocal cavity to generate a sequence of 123 frequencies separated by 300 MHz. The scan sequence of single sideband frequencies of 600 ns duration covers a 37 GHz region at a spectral scan rate of 10 kHz (100 μs per scan). Simultaneously, an eye-safe backscatter LIDAR system at 1.064 μm is used to monitor the atmospheric boundary layer. IPDA LIDAR measurements of the CO2 and CH4 dry air mixing ratios are presented in comparison with those from a commercial cavity ring-down (CRD) instrument. Differences between the IPDA LIDAR and CRD concentrations in several cases appear to be well correlated with the atmospheric aerosol structure from the backscatter LIDAR measurements. IPDA LIDAR dry air mixing ratios of CO2 and CH4 are determined with fit uncertainties of 2.8 μmol/mol (ppm) for CO2 and 22 nmol/mol (ppb) for CH4 over 30 s measurement periods. For longer averaging times (up to 1200 s), improvements in these detection limits by up to 3-fold are estimated from Allan variance analyses. Two sources of systematic error are identified and methods to remove them are discussed, including speckle interference from wavelength decorrelation and the seed power dependence of amplified spontaneous emission. Accuracies in the dry air retrievals of CO2 and CH4 in a 30 s measurement period are estimated at 4 μmol/mol (1% of ambient levels) and 50 nmol/mol (3%), respectively.
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