Monitoring and forecasting of atmospheric winds within the United States provides protection from severe weather conditions, enables the safe operations of airports, provides the ability to predict wildfire evolution, and the dispersion of hazardous material plumes. However, the current NOAA National Profiler Network (NPN) is limited in spatial extent and is temporally and spatially very sparse. Ophir proposes to design, develop and demonstrate a direct detection lidar that is sufficiently low cost to enable wide-spread deployment to provide a more thorough, and cost effective wind and temperature measurement capability nationwide. The innovation is to design a Rayleigh/Mie lidar that enables the use of a low cost, small, rugged, highly-reliable, diode laser capable of sufficient output power in conjunction with a vapor filter to measure vertical wind and temperature profiles, reliably. SUMMARY OF
Anticipated Results: The anticipated results of this project include the development, demonstration and resulting production of a low cost, atmospheric wind and temperature profiling lidar. Once this innovative lidar approach is demonstrated for accurate measurement of wind and temperature profiles, its use for atmospheric measurements will be widely adopted due to its measurement accuracy, reliability, small size and low cost. The potential commercial applications of the lidar development include the improvement in available weather forecasting for human safety, airport safety and for homeland security threats, and for the wind energy site assessment market
