Abstract

The coherent lidar work at the Marshall Space Flight Center has recently been moved to new quarters which allow a more permanent setup while providing sufficient space for more flexibility. The laboratory facilities include an electronics shop, calibration laboratory, and the main lidar laboratory. A room is in the process being set up for laser systems characterization studies. The airborne pulsed system has been refurbished to repair the failure of the modulator crystal during the 1984 flight tests and set up in the main laboratory. The telescope which had expericed considrable degradation after some four years of being shipped back and forth across the country was stripped, recoated and the alignment checked. A new completely programmable scan control system has been completed and the hemispherical scanner has been mounted to the roof of the laboratory. An extensive set of software is being developed for the collection, processing and display of the ground based data. The data collection and raw data display software have been completed and checked out. Real time and post processing capability for such features as automatic absorption and backscatter profiling, and VAD wind profiling are underway. The capability for single shot data collection and processing are also being provided. A number of experiments are being planned for the August/September time frame when the system comes on line. These experiments involve primarily investigations into atmospheric effects on signal processing and boundary layer measurements. The pulse energy (10 mJ) is too low to perform such long range measurements as backscatter profiling in the upper troposphere. An experiment is being designed to assess the feasibility of demonstrating of lag angle effects.

© 1987 Optical Society of America