Application of pulsed Doppler lidar in the airport terminal area

Abstract

Pulsed coherent Doppler lidar systems have matured rapidly, especially at solid-state wavelengths. Turnkey systems are commercially available and are being deployed for various aviation applications. Doppler lidar data is used in the airport terminal area to map hazardous wind shear and turbulence levels and to detect and track wake vortices. Future applications could include slant path visibility monitoring. Several permanent installations and rapidly deployable instrument configurations have been achieved. The benefit of the infrared Doppler lidar relative to its microwave counterparts is the ability to sense clear air hazards, especially those in and around local terrain features. The fact that the lidar beam is quite narrow eliminates artifacts associated with sidelobe-induced ground clutter. This paper summarizes our autonomous pulsed lidar developments and reviews sample results.

Lidar-Measured Wind Profiles: The Missing Link in the Global Observing System

“…Multiple references provide additional information on coherent detection systems (Kavaya et al 1989(Kavaya et al , 2014Henderson et al 1991;Wagener et al 1995; among others) and their use in atmospheric boundary layer studies (Post and Cupp 1990;Huffaker and Hardesty 1996;Rothermel et al 1998;Grund et al 2001;Banta et al 2002;Koch et al 2010;Tucker et al 2009;Bluestein et al 2011;de Wekker et al 2012), wind turbine studies (Käsler et al 2010), and hazard detection and avoidance at airports (Hannon et al 2005). Coherent airborne DWLs have also been used to explore the potential impact of future spacebased lidars and to develop the necessary advanced signal processing and data interpretation algorithms .…”

Numerical study of tilt aberration on heterodyne efficiency using partially coherent beam

“…The accurate and continuous measurement of the atmospheric wind field is of great importance for meteorology, flight safety, and numerical weather prediction. [1][2][3] Coherent Doppler wind lidar has been widely studied and applied as a high-precision and high-resolution means of wind field remote sensing detection. [4][5][6] The principle of coherent Doppler wind measurement 7,8 is that the LO light and signal light are incident on a photodetector through a mixer.…”

“…The accurate and continuous measurement of the atmospheric wind field is of great importance for meteorology, flight safety, and numerical weather prediction 1 – 3 Coherent Doppler wind lidar has been widely studied and applied as a high-precision and high-resolution means of wind field remote sensing detection 4 – 6 …”

Monitoring Critical Infrastructure Using 3D LiDAR Point Clouds

“…wake models[82]. However, commercially available Wind-Tracer or custom-built LiDAR systems have several disadvantages such as they are (a) large and heavy, (b) subjected to high-maintenance, (c) suffering from reliability issues, and (d) often prohibitively costly.…”