Boundary-layer water vapor profiling using differential absorption radar

Towards quantitative atmospheric water vapor profiling with differential absorption lidar.

Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) is a powerful laser-based technique for trace gas profiling of the atmosphere. However, this technique is still under active development requiring precise and accurate wavelength stabilization, as well as accurate spectroscopic parameters of the specific resonance line and the effective absorption cross-section of the system. In this paper we describe a nove...

Differential-Absorption Lidar for Water Vapor and Temperature Profiling

Water Vapor Profiling Using a Widely Tunable, Amplified Diode-Laser-Based Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL)

A differential absorption lidar (DIAL) instrument for automated profiling of water vapor in the lower troposphere has been designed, tested, and is in routine operation at Montana State University. The laser transmitter for the DIAL instrument uses a widely tunable external cavity diode laser (ECDL) to injection seed two cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) to produce a laser transm...

Field-deployable diode-laser-based differential absorption lidar (DIAL) for profiling water vapor

A field-deployable water vapor profiling instrument that builds on the foundation of the preceding generations of diode-laser-based differential absorption lidar (DIAL) laboratory prototypes was constructed and tested. Significant advances are discussed, including a unique shared telescope design that allows expansion of the outgoing beam for eye-safe operation with optomechanical and thermal s...

Development of a widely tunable amplified diode laser differential absorption lidar for profiling atmospheric water vapor

This work describes the design and testing of a highly-tunable differential absorption lidar (DIAL) instrument utilizing an all-semiconductor transmitter. This new DIAL instrument transmitter has a highly-tunable external cavity diode laser (ECDL) as a seed laser source for two cascaded commercial tapered amplifiers. The transmitter has the capability of tuning over a range of ~ 17 nm centered ...