Abstract

Our recent experimental study¹ of the relative technical merits of heterodyne and direct-detection CO₂ DIAL for path-averaged remote sensing was carried out using LIDAR backscattered returns from topographic targets. In these studies, the average SNR's and statistical and temporal characteristics of the LIDAR returns were measured simultaneously for each detection technique. The experimental results were found to be in good agreement with a simple analysis which predicted the relative sensitivity of each detection technique for path-averaged measurements. The detection systems used in the above experiments were not optimized for either of the two detection techniques.

© 1983 Optical Society of America