Lidar: A 50-Year Personal Retrospective

The presentation will be a personal retrospective highlighting advances and notable events in lidar since its inception (1963) a little over 50 years ago. The presenter (J.A. Reagan) first learned of lidar in 1964, as a beginning PhD student at University of Wisconsin, hearing from his soon to be major professor (Prof W.P.Birkemeier), of a lidar talk given by Myron Ligda at the 1964 World Conf. on Radio Meteorology in Boulder, CO. Birkemeirer encouraged Reagan to pursue building a lidar and applying it to investigate atmospheric structural features. Doing so Reagan built a simple elastic scattering ruby lidar that saw “first light” in late 1965. It was employed in exploratory investigations to test the system and observe a variety of atmospheric structural features through most of 1966, the results of which formed the basis of Reagan’s dissertation. Reagan went on to become a faculty member at the University of Arizona where in the following ~ 50 years he pursued a wide variety of lidar investigations, often in collaboration with his long-time colleague B.M. Herman (deceased, 8 June, 2018). Reagan worked (often in collaboration or team participant in numerous missions and projects) with most types of lidars, excepting Raman lidar, (e.g., slant-path lidar, bistatic lidar, micro pulse lidar, DIAL, shuttle lidar (LITE), airborne HSRL and satellite lidar (GLAS and CALIPSO)). He has also participated in many professional/governmental committees, panels and task forces related to lidar remote sensing, and helped organize/participate in many lidar related conferences and symposia. The presentation will draw extensively upon these experiences and his interactions with his fellow lidar researchers over the decades.