Compact Lidar for Environmental Sensing in Support of Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare

The Shipborne Atmospheric Extinction Lidar (SAEL) is a compact lidar that has been developed by Physical Sciences Inc. under Navy SBIR programs to provide range-resolved extinction measurements along a slant path.Ā It is intended to become test range instrumentation for High Energy Laser (HEL) weapon performance assessment by providing environmental situational awareness.Ā Data products include range-resolved aerosol backscatter and extinction coefficients at a wavelength of 1.05ĀĄm with high spatial and temporal resolutions. SAEL can obtain scans of these products in both azimuth and elevation to ranges of 10 km.Ā The Navy has a variety of HEL weapons under development over a range of wavelengths.Ā This program will increase the value of SAEL to the Navy by enhancing its capabilities to support a wider range of HEL system testing.Ā This will be achieved by developing a procedure to scale the data products to wavelengths that match other HEL weapons.Ā The technical effort will: 1) increase the precision and accuracy of the aerosol backscatter and extinction coefficient vertical profiles and 2) scale these data products over the wavelength range of 1-2 Ąm.Ā Both of these efforts will be accomplished by development of computational algorithms which are then vetted by field measurements.