Lidar Studies of the Alkali Metals

The development of the lidar technique in the early sixties, and the subsequent introduction of tunable lasers, made accurate measurements of the vertical distribution of the alkali metals in the atmosphere possible for the first time. Over the last decade a great deal of information was obtained on the spatial and temporal variations of sodium, and rather less information was obtained about potassium and lithium. The possibility of making continuous observations of the vertical distribution of sodium, coupled with temperature measurements via the determination of the Doppler spectrum of the returned lidar signal, offers a potentially useful technique for studying the dynamics of the 80 to 100 km region of the atmosphere.