Advanced laser remote sensing

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Remote measurement of wind velocities is critical to a wide variety of applications such as environmental studies, weather prediction, aircraft safety, the accuracy of projectiles, bombs, parachute drops, prediction of the dispersal of chemical and biological warfare agents, and the debris from nuclear explosions. Major programs to develop remote sensors for these applications currently exist in the DoD and NASA. At present, however, there are no real-time, three-dimensional wind measurement techniques that are practical for many of these applications and we report on two new promising techniques. The first new technique uses an elastic backscatter lidar to track aerosol patterns in the atmosphere and to calculate three dimensional wind velocities from changes in the positions of the aerosol patterns. This was first done by Professor Ed Eloranta of the University of Wisconsin using post processing techniques and we are adapting Professor Eloranta`s algorithms to a real-time data processor and installing it in an existing elastic backscatter lidar system at Los Alamos (the XM94 helicopter lidar), which has a compatible data processing and control system. The second novel wind sensing technique is based on radio-frequency (RF) modulation and spatial filtering of elastic backscatter lidars. Because of their compactness and reliability, solid state lasers are the lasers of choice for many remote sensing applications, including wind sensing