Doppler lidar processing for atmospheric turbulence measurements

A Doppler lidar is described, its processing methods are characterized, and two alternate techniques are considered. The described system uses a CO2 laser transmitting at 10.6 microns and a bank of narrow band filters for the spectrum analysis. Typical results obtained with this system are presented. The two alternate techniques involve computation of the discrete spectrum by use of the discrete Fourier transform. The first technique involves single-pulse processing and incoherent integration, while the second technique performs coherent processing on the train of received pulses.