Abstract

There are a number of reasons to consider operating a Doppler lidar at wavelengths near 1 µm rather than at 10.6 µm. A very important one for NCAR applications is that the shorter-wavelength lidar offers better range and velocity resolution for measurements in the turbulent boundary layer because the product of range resolution and spectral width of the velocity spectrum is proportional to the wavelength. In addition, the quantized backscattering coefficient (number of photons backscattered for a given transmitted pulse energy) may be greater near 1 µ than at 10.6 µm for particle size distributions with a relatively small mean particle size.

© 1995 Optical Society of America