High sensitive Doppler lidars for tropospheric wind measurements

Development and realization of the spaceborne Doppler lidars for global wind measurement is expected in the early next century. Two detection techniques, heterodyne and direct detection, have been examined so far. The direct detection systems for wind measurement utilize narrow band filters to measure the Doppler shift of aerosol Mie or molecular Rayleigh backscatter. For the filtering method with etalons the edge and fringe techniques have been compared. Two-channel method is discussed in this paper, and the laser and etalon parameters are selected for the maximum wind sensitivity.