Low Cost, Compact, Direct Detection Wind and Temperature Lidar for Measurements in the Boundary Layer

Monitoring and forecasting of atmospheric winds within the United States provides protection from severe weather conditions, enables the safe operations of airports, provides the ability to predict wildfire evolution, and the dispersion of hazardous material plumes.However, the current NOAA National Profiler Network (NPN) is limited in spatial extent and is temporally and spatially very sparse.Ophir proposes to design, develop and demonstrate a direct detection lidar that is sufficiently low cost to enable wide-spread deployment to provide a more thorough, and cost effective wind and temperature measurement capability nationwide.The innovation is to design a Rayleigh/Mie lidar that enables the use of a low cost, small, rugged, highly-reliable, diode laser capable of sufficient output power in conjunction with a vapor filter to measure vertical wind and temperature profiles, reliably.