Abstract

In the fall of 1989 a series of flights were made to compare backscatter measurements performed by different lidars and a second flight may be made in the spring of 1990. The lidars to be compared may be monostatic and bistatic systems and will transmit light of one state of polarization and analyze received light in a different state of polarization. In this paper the nature of the signals will be analyzed by a vector-matrix theory where the light is represented by (4x1) Stokes vectors and the interaction with the atmosphere is represented by a (4x4) Mueller matrix. In each apparatus a value for β, the volume backscatter coefficient, is measured and it will be sums of differences of certain components of the $\widehat{\beta }$ matrix which will depend upon the polarization properties of the laser. Pritchard and Elliott¹ have performed a similar analysis for an atmospheric polarimeter but they studied a fixed target of magnesium oxide. This discussion will assume a pulsed lidar (rectangular pulse of width τ) so a thin slab of the atmosphere of thickness cτ/2 centered about R_s=c(t/2-τ/2) is examined.

© 1990 Optical Society of America