Correction of temperature influence on the wind retrieval from a mobile Rayleigh Doppler lidar**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41174130, 41174131, 41274151, and 41304123).

Abstract

A mobile Rayleigh Doppler lidar based on double-edge technique is implemented for simultaneously observing wind and temperature at heights of 15 km–60 km away from ground. Before the inversion of the Doppler shift due to wind, the Rayleigh response function should be calculated, which is a convolution of the laser spectrum, Rayleigh backscattering function, and the transmission function of the Fabry–Perot interferometer used as the frequency discriminator in the lidar. An analysis of the influence of the temperature on the accuracy of the line-of-sight winds shows that real-time temperature profiles are needed because the bandwidth of the Rayleigh backscattering function is temperature-dependent. An integration method is employed in the inversion of the temperature, where the convergence of this method and the high signal-to-noise ratio below 60 km ensure the accuracy and precision of the temperature profiles inverted. Then, real-time and on-site temperature profiles are applied to correct the wind instead of using temperature profiles from a numerical prediction system or atmosphere model. The corrected wind profiles show satisfactory agreement with the wind profiles acquired from radiosondes, proving the reliability of the method.