Development of practical UV Rayleigh lidar for measuring atmospheric temperature profiles in the troposphere

A new Rayleigh scattering lidar system at eye-safe 355nm ultraviolet wavelength has been developed for measuring vertical profiles of atmospheric temperature in the lower troposphere, based on the high-spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) technique using two narrow-band Fabry-Perot filters. The Doppler broadened width of the Rayleigh backscatter signal was measured for the temperature analysis. The central frequency and the width of the two filters are carefully selected to optimize the detection sensitivity of the filter. In order to reject the intense Mie backscattering component introduced in the Rayleigh signal, which affects the temperature accuracy, the third narrow-band filter has been installed to measure the Mie scattering intensity. A signal processing method has been developed to derive the temperature profile. In a preliminary experiment, it was shown that the temperature sensitivity of the filter is 0.4%/K and the measurement error is about 1K at 2km height.