Portable Atmosphere Scanning LIDAR

To address the NASA need for innovative instrumentation to support its current and future missions related to the investigation of Earth's ecosystem, Physical Optics Corporation proposes to adapt its portable, robust, ground-based light detection and ranging (LIDAR) weather system to measure winds, temperature, and humidity in a 3D volume with the ability to scan horizontally and vertically with a range of up to 10 km. The proposed Portable Atmospheric Scanning LIDAR (PASL) system will include POC's recent developments in coherent LIDAR for wind sensing, Differential Absorption LIDAR (DIAL) for measurements of water vapor content distribution, and Rotational Raman LIDAR for temperature measurements. POC's existing and proposed innovations in the integrated LIDAR designs will provide NASA with a system with very low size, weight, and power consumption, which will make the PASL easily deployable to any place on the globe and capable of long-term autonomous operation in support of NASA's research missions. In Phase I, POC will refine its existing non-scanning system and modify its design to facilitate 3D scanning, extend its functional range of operation to 10 km, further develop software for fast data processing, and fabricate a prototype of the wind LIDAR (TRL-4). In Phase II, the operational prototype of the entire scanning PASL system will be fabricated and tested (TRL-6).