High Altitude Demonstration Flights on an Airborne Doppler LIDAR

Feasibility Study for Future Space-Borne Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar, Part 1: Instrumental Overview for Global Wind Profile Observation

“…NICT developed a 2-μm single-frequency Q-switched Tm, Ho: YLF laser operating at 30 Hz with a pulse duration of 150 ns FWHM (FWHM: full width at half maximum) (Ishii et al 2010;Mizutani et al 2015). JAXA developed a 1.5-μm optical fiber laser for airborne application emitting 0.0019 J at 4000 Hz (average power = 7.6 W) (Ino kuchi and Tanaka 2009; Inokuchi et al 2014). Using Eqs.…”

Aviation Turbulence

“…In 1999, the Japanese JAXA initiated a similar program for the development of an airborne coherent Doppler lidar. Prototypes of this fiber-based lidar system have been flown on JAXA's Beechcraft (for low altitudes research) in 2007 (Inokuchi et al 2009) and its Gulfstream II aircraft in 2010 (Inokuchi et al 2010;Inokuchi et al 2014). All these flight tests of different coherent lidar systems show the high potential of this technology.…”

Design of a monolithic Michelson interferometer for fringe imaging in a near-field, UV, direct-detection Doppler wind lidar

“…Systems with CO 2 -lasers, Tm:LuAG-lasers, and with Er-doped fiber lasers have successfully been applied to measure wind speeds at the ground level and in the boundary layer [14][15][16]. Turbulence detection in the troposphere at an altitude of 12 km with a coherent DWL has been demonstrated up to 9 km ahead of an aircraft with a range bin of 150 m [17]. At these high altitudes, the concentration of aerosols is low and the coherence of the received signal is reduced, which decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the maximum range of detection.…”