Doppler Wind Lidar
by Mary Forsythe — last modified Feb 08, 2012 08:52 AM
Contents
Derivation
The first space-borne Doppler Wind Lidar (DWL) is due to be launched on the ESA Earth Explorer Core Mission ADM-Aeolus in 2013. DWL uses a laser to emit light pulses towards the atmosphere. The emitted light is backscattered by aerosol particles and molecules at different heights in the atmosphere. The backscattered signal is detected by a receiving telescope; the time delay is used to determine the height of the scattering layers. The frequency of the received signal is Doppler-shifted due to relative motion of the scatterers along the line of sight and can be used to estimate horizontal wind speed at different levels in the atmosphere.
For further information on the DWL and processing software, see Tan, D.G.H.,et al., 2008: The ADM-Aeolus wind retrieval algorithms and Stoffelen, A.,et al., 2005: The atmospheric dynamics mission for global wind measurement
Advice for research users
Real-time plots
Future mission, data not yet available.
Monitoring
Future mission, data not yet available.
NWP usage and impact
Although ADM-Aelous, as only one satellite with a narrow swath, provides limited horizontal coverage and only the cross-track wind component, simulated data experiments have predicted good forecast impact e.g. Tan & Andersson 2005, QJRMS 131 p1737-1757 and Stoffelen et al. 2006, QJRMS 132 p1927-1947.