Coherent Doppler Lidar for Wind Sensing

Abstract

An eye-safe all-fiber Coherent Doppler Lidar for wind sensing system has been developed and tested at the Remote Sensing Laboratory of the City College of New York, New York, NY. The system, which operates at a 20 kHz pulse repetition rate and acquires lidar return signals at 400 MSample/s, accumulates signals that are as much as 20 dB lower than the receiver noise power by using embedded programming techniques. Two FPGA embedded programming algorithms are designed and compared. In the first algorithm, power spectra of return signals are calculated and accumulated for different range gates. Line of sight wind speed estimates can then be calculated after transferring the range gated accumulated power spectra to a host computer. In the second FPGA algorithm, a digital IQ demodulator and down sampler allow an autocorrelation matrix representing a pre-selected number of lags to be accumulated. Precision in the velocity measurements is estimated to be on the order of 0.08 m/s and the precision in the measured horizontal wind direction is estimated to be to be about 2°.

Observations and Models of Turbulence During Heat Events in Complex Urban Coastal Regions Using Multiple Doppler Wind Lidars

“…of the event and the low level jets. The analysis performed in this study when combined with evolving Doppler Lidar inversion techniques [7][8][9] , will be able to advance the methods described in this study.…”