Active probing of cloud thickness and optical depth using wide-angle imaging LIDAR.
- Anthony B.
- Charles A.
- Larry L.
At most optical wavelengths, laser light in a cloud lidar experiment is not absorbed but merely scattered out of the beam, eventually escaping the cloud via multiple scattering. There is much information available in this light scattered far from the input beam, information ignored by traditional 'on-beam' lidar. Monitoring these off-beam returns in a fully space- and time-resolved manner is the essence of our unique instrument, Wide Angle Imaging Lidar (WAIL). In effect, WAIL produces wide-field (60{sup o} full-angle) 'movies' of the scattering process and records the cloud's radiative Green functions. A direct data product of WAIL is the distribution of photon path lengths resulting from multiple scattering in the cloud. Following insights from diffusion theory, we can use the measured Green functions to infer the physical thickness and optical depth of the cloud layer. WAIL is notable in that it is applicable to optically thick clouds, a regime in which traditional lidar is reduced to ceilometry. Section 2 covers the up-to-date evolution of the nighttime WAIL instrument at LANL. Section 3 reports our progress towards daytime capability for WAIL, an important extension to full diurnal cycle monitoring by means of an ultra-narrow magneto-optic atomic line filter. Section 4 describes briefly how the important cloud properties can be inferred from WAIL signals.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- OSTI ID:
- 976228
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-02-4393; TRN: US1002881
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Submitted to: Proceedings of 11th AMS Conference on Atmospheric Radiation, Ogden (Utah), June 3-7, 2002, AMS, Boston, MA
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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