抄録
New technology for compact, eye safe lidar is surveyed. Advances with solid state lasers anddetectors permit efficient lidar designs that meet requirements for full time atmospheric monitoring. Micro pulse lidar is an approach that employs kHz pulse rate Nd : YLF lasers and microJoule pulse energies at visible wavelengths. Eye safety is an essential factor and is obtained bybeam expansion. High performance is realized by solid state Geiger mode avalanche photodiodephoton counting signal acquisition. The capability to monitor all significant cloud andaerosol scattering by a compact instrument has been demonstrated. Pseudorandom modulation CW lidar is under development. CW diode lasers are used directly as transmitters with theadvantage of wavelength tunability for water vapor and other differential absorption measurements. Background photon noise and dynamic range are problems for CW lidar. Advancedconventional pulsed diode laser lidar and near infrared lidar at fundamentally eye safewavelengths are in development for some applications.
