87th AMS Annual Meeting

Wednesday, 17 January 2007
Automated compact EZ Lidars for aerosol and cloud tracking and wind profiling
Exhibit Hall C (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Iwona S. Stachlewska, LEOSPHERE Lidar Environmental Observations, Palaiseau, France; and L. Sauvage, P. Chazette, J. Sanack, J. P. Cariou, and M. Valla
Poster PDF (493.5 kB)
The LSCE, CEA/CNRS, France and the LEOSPHERE have jointly developed an eye safe, portable, robust and compact lidar EZ AEROSOL LIDAR TM dedicated to remote observations of highly resolved structures of tropospheric aerosols and clouds. It is based on a UV pulsed laser operating at 20Hz repetition rate. The conceptual simplicity of the lidar scheme ensures easy utilization of the lidar during field campaigns even under tough conditions and/or a mobile platform (car, ship, ultra light aircraft). In automated vertical mode configuration lidar covers the range from full overlap at 100m up to the Tropopause level (15km) providing the information on PBL structures and Cirrus clouds at the same time. The standard system is designed for easy upgradeability for scanning, cross polarisation detection, nitrogen and water vapour detection.

In a partnership with the ONERA/DOTA, France and the LEOSPHERE a prototype of an eye safe, portable, robust and compact Doppler lidar EZ WIND LIDAR TM dedicated to measurements of the vertical profiles of the wind speed and wind direction was developed. This pulsed heterodyne lidar comprises optic-fibre IR laser operating at 20kHz repetition rate. Large number of FFTs is averaged to provide a radial wind speed profile using Maximum Likelihood Estimator. The horizontal and vertical wind speed and direction are reconstructed from measurements at four lines of sight and no calibration is needed. The profile range of the prototype system is between 45-650m with vertical resolution of 30m for integration times of 2Hz in line of sight. It is able to measure the wind speed in the range between ±30m/s. This wind lidar shall find use as a complementary to the masts providing continuous wind profiles of very high accuracy in order to improve continuous meteorological and pollution measurements.

In this paper description of the EZ AEROSOL LIDAR and the EZ WIND LIDAR is given. Selected examples obtained with the EZ AEROSOL LIDAR during several dedicated campaigns over large cities, suburban and in rural areas, e.g. pollution tracking (LISAIR, Paris, France), African monsoon observations (AMMA, Niamey, Niger), aerosol and cloud validation campaigns (AERONET sunphotometer and SIRTA lidar, Palaiseau, France; ARM SGP instrumentation, Lamont, USA) are also presented. These are followed by selected examples of vertical profiles of wind speed and wind direction obtained by the EZ WIND LIDAR during past/current test and validation campaigns (ONERA/DOTA and CEA, Palaiseau, France) are presented.

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