Abstract

Presently, conventional techniques of atmospheric monitoring based on local air sampling suffer from one disadvantage: air quality (the concentration of trace gases in the atmosphere) is monitored only at specific locations, where the respective samplers are placed; consequently, strong spatial concentration variations may not be detected at all or merely as diluted and small. On the other hand, LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging),¹ the optical analogon of RADAR, offers the advantage of monitoring extended remote areas (from a single LIDAR sensor location) and allows concentration distributions of trace gases to be recorded in fairly short time. Thus, LIDAR is a well suited technique for environmental and industrial atmospheric monitoring (early warning).

© 1994 IEEE