Development of LiDAR for real-time measurement of near-ground turbulence profiles and its observation results

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of obtaining the vertical distribution of turbulence in a timeefficient way for evaluating FSO systems and related laser applications, making it necessary to specify the profile of turbulence along the atmospheric propagation path. This paper presents a method for the rapid measurement of nearground turbulence profiles. This method is capable of providing a real-time evaluation of an optical propagation link, making it a useful tool for remote sensing of atmospheric turbulence. Based on this method, a turbulence profile LiDAR has been built in Hefei (31.8°N, 117.3°E) and long-term continuous measurements of the vertical distribution of turbulence were performed from October 2021 to November 2021. The retrieved results of turbulence profiles show that the LiDAR can describe spatiotemporal distributions of turbulence intensity along the measurement path corresponding to the weather and daily time changes.