Abstract

Laser heterodyne radiometer (LHR) exploits the heterodyne signal generated by solar radiation beated with local oscillator (LO) light to extract information on atmospheric species in the atmospheric column. Most of currently reported LHRs are affected by LO-induced relative intensity noise (RIN), which poses a challenge for high-sensitivity detection. In this work, a near-infrared RIN-suppressed LHR is proposed for simultaneous detection of water vapor and HDO in the atmospheric column. The operability of a home-made sun tracker can be obtained from coarse tracking and fine tracking, which offers an excellent opportunity for unattended observation. A tunable distributed feedback (DFB) diode laser centered at 1552.9 nm is employed as LO, where LO-induced RIN is suppressed by a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) operating in the dynamic gain saturation regime. By locking LO power and suppressing LO-induced RIN, the SOA-assisted LHR is dominated by 1.27 times shot-noise and the signal-to-ratio (SNR) of heterodyne signal is increased by 5 times. Based on atmospheric transmission spectra measured with the RIN-suppressed LHR in Hefei, China, the total column abundances of water vapor and HDO are retrieved to be 2050 ppm and 0.6 ppm, respectively, with uncertainty of 2 %.

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