Wind Profiling with an Eye-Safe Coherent Doppler Lidar System: Comparison with Radiosondes and VHF Radar

Abstract

An eye-safe airborne coherent Doppler lidar system has been developed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). This system can also be used at ground level and ground-based experiments were made to evaluate the system performance at the NICT Wakkanai radio observatory. The obtained wind profiles were compared with those measured by radiosondes launched at the Wakkanai local meteorological observatory, and by a VHFR system installed by NICT near the Wakkanai airport. Although the volume measured by the coherent Doppler lidar system differed spatially and temporally from those by the radiosonde and the NICT VHF radar system, the wind profiles observed by the coherent Doppler lidar system agreed well with those observed by other instruments. The wind velocities obtained through the full correlation analysis of the VHF radar system were a little smaller than those from the coherent Doppler lidar system, which is consistent with previous statistical results for the VHF radar system. The ground-based results showed that the standard deviations of wind velocity estimates in the laser pulse accumulation seemed to approach a constant value under the real atmospheric conditions, and that the lower limit of the signal-to-noise ratio for the reliable estimate of the wind velocity decreases with the laser pulse accumulation. The ground-based experiments showed that the coherent Doppler lidar system is a reliable system for wind-related research.