Demonstration of measuring sea fog with an SNSPD-based Lidar system

Jiang Zhu,Peiheng Wu,Lin Kang,Zhijun Feng,Yajun Chen,Xiaoqing Jia,Ganhua Wu,Xiachao Yan,Yang Wu,Xiaoying Zhou,Jian Chen,Jiquan Zhai,Zhizhong Wang,Qi Chen,Chi Zhang,Labao Zhang

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-15429-y

Jiang Zhu, Peiheng Wu + Show 14 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15429-y

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Abstract

The monitor of sea fogs become more important with the rapid development of marine activities. Remote sensing through laser is an effective tool for monitoring sea fogs, but still challengeable for large distance. We demonstrated a Long-distance Lidar for sea fog with superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD), which extended the ranging area to a 180-km diameter area. The system, which was verified by using a benchmark distance measurement of a known island, is applied to the Mie scattering weather prediction Lidar system. The fog echo signal distribution in the range of 42.3∼63.5 km and 53.2∼74.2 km was obtained by the Lidar system. Then the fog concentration and the velocity of the fog were deduced from the distribution, which is consistent with the weather prediction. The height of the sea fog is about two hundred meter while the visibility at this height is about 90 km due to the Earth’s radius of curvature. Therefore, the capability of this SNSPD-based Lidar was close to the theoretical limit for sea fog measurements for extremely high signal-to-noise ratio of SNSPD.

Highlights

The monitor of sea fogs become more important with the rapid development of marine activities
The known distance measurement serves as a benchmark of the system to test the accuracy
The echo signal in the range of 31.6~42.0 km is detected and the fog distribution is derived based on the formula for the fog concentration

Summary

Introduction

The monitor of sea fogs become more important with the rapid development of marine activities. We demonstrated a Long-distance Lidar for sea fog with superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD), which extended the ranging area to a 180-km diameter area. The capability of this SNSPD-based Lidar was close to the theoretical limit for sea fog measurements for extremely high signal-to-noise ratio of SNSPD. The detection efficiency is up to 93% in the near infrared band while the dark count is less than 100 Hz. SNSPD has been applied to distance measurements based on a satellite laser system[16,17]. The high efficiency, low noise SNSPD system has obvious advantages for long-distance sea fog detection. The distribution and range of the fog are calculated and the results show that the SNSPD proved capable to detect this long-distance meteorological phenomenon

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Results

Conclusion