May 2014
Spotlight Summary by Zhishen Liu
Ice thickness measurements by Raman scattering
The detection of ice thickness is very important for monitoring global environmental changes as well as submarine activity below ice. Of course, measuring ice thickness is very challenging, and up to now only a few methods have been effective in achieving this goal. Lidar is a promising technique for the measurement of ice thickness, in large part because it can be performed airborne, allowing remote measurements that can cover large effective areas, unlike more localized ship-borne hydro-acoustic techniques. However, determining what kind of lidar technique can measure ice thickness accurately and efficiently is a challenge for the ocean lidar community.
In this Optics Letters article, researchers from the Wave Research Center at the Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Science propose the use of a Raman scattering method, since Raman scattering is able to detect the ice-water interface, while elastic scattering detects the air-ice interface. The experiments show that the accuracy of this measurement is 2.5% for an ice layer with a thickness of 80mm. The technique reported in this article should, therefore, give accurate estimates to the weight and volume of ice. Perhaps the authors will explore the feasibility of airborne experiments using this lidar technique, as well as consider using a 532nm YAG laser whose higher pulse energy (~50mJ 500Hz) might allow measuring ice layers thicker than 80mm.
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In this Optics Letters article, researchers from the Wave Research Center at the Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Science propose the use of a Raman scattering method, since Raman scattering is able to detect the ice-water interface, while elastic scattering detects the air-ice interface. The experiments show that the accuracy of this measurement is 2.5% for an ice layer with a thickness of 80mm. The technique reported in this article should, therefore, give accurate estimates to the weight and volume of ice. Perhaps the authors will explore the feasibility of airborne experiments using this lidar technique, as well as consider using a 532nm YAG laser whose higher pulse energy (~50mJ 500Hz) might allow measuring ice layers thicker than 80mm.
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Article Information
Ice thickness measurements by Raman scattering
Sergey M. Pershin, Vasily N. Lednev, Vladimir K. Klinkov, Renat N. Yulmetov, and Alexey F. Bunkin
Opt. Lett. 39(9) 2573-2575 (2014) View: HTML | PDF