Journal Article

Coherent Focused Lidars for Doppler Sensing of Aerosols and Wind

Hill, Chris

2018

Overview

Many coherent lidars are used today with aerosol targets for detailed studies of e.g., local wind speed and turbulence. Fibre-optic lidars operating near 1.5 μm dominate the wind energy market, with hundreds now installed worldwide. Here, we review some of the beam/target physics for these lidars and discuss practical problems. In a monostatic Doppler lidar with matched local oscillator and transmit beams, focusing of the beam gives rise to a spatial sensitivity along the beam direction that depends on the inverse of beam area; for Gaussian beams, this sensitivity follows a Lorentzian function. At short range, the associated probe volume can be extremely small and contain very few scatterers; we describe predictions and simulations for few-scatterer and multi-scatterer sensing. We review the single-particle mode (SPM) and volume mode (VM) modelling of Frehlich et al. and some numerical modelling of lidar detector time series and statistics. Interesting behaviour may be observed from a modern coherent lidar used at short ranges (e.g., in a wind tunnel) and/or with weak aerosol seeding. We also review some problems (and solutions) for Doppler-sign-insensitive lidars.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: coherent Doppler lidar / single-particle / wind sensing