Ultraviolet Rayleigh lidar for wind and temperature measurements

A new method of simultaneous remote sensing of atmospheric wind and temperature by a ultraviolet Rayleigh lidar is described. This technique uses two narrowband filters located at either side of the wings of the Rayleigh backscatter spectrum to analyze Rayleigh backscattering signals. These filters are selected to be greatly sensitive to both velocity and temperature. By measuring the ratio and the sum of the two normalized filtered signals, the line-of-sight wind velocity and temperature profiles can be retrieved. A lidar system is proposed for the wind velocity and temperature measurements in the middle atmosphere, and the simulation results show that the accuracies of velocity and temperature are about 1 m/s and 2 K at the height of 30 km, respectively. The influence of aerosol component has been estimated for clear weather conditions, and with an uncertainty of aerosol component of 15% the errors are about 0.1 m/s and 2 K above the troposphere, respectively.