Pulsed airborne lidar measurements of atmospheric optical depth using the Oxygen A-band at 765 nm.

We report on an airborne demonstration of atmospheric oxygen optical depth measurements with an IPDA lidar using a fiber-based laser system and a photon counting detector. Accurate knowledge of atmospheric temperature and pressure is required for NASA's Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons (ASCENDS) space mission, and climate modeling studies. The lidar uses a doubled erbium-doped fiber amplifier and single photon-counting detector to measure oxygen absorption at 765 nm. Our results show good agreement between the experimentally derived differential optical depth measurements with the theoretical predictions for aircraft altitudes from 3 to 13 km.

Airborne measurements of CO2 column absorption and range using a pulsed direct-detection integrated path differential absorption lidar.

We report on airborne CO(2) column absorption measurements made in 2009 with a pulsed direct-detection lidar operating at 1572.33 nm and utilizing the integrated path differential absorption technique. We demonstrated these at different altitudes from an aircraft in July and August in flights over four locations in the central and eastern United States. The results show clear CO(2) line shape and absorption signals, which follow the expected changes with aircraft altitude from 3 to 13 km. The lidar measurement statistics were also calculated for each flight as a function of altitude. The optical depth varied nearly linearly with altitude, consistent with calculations based on atmospheric models. The scatter in the optical depth measurements varied with aircraft altitude as expected, and the median measurement precisions for the column varied from 0.9 to 1.2 ppm. The altitude range with the lowest scatter was 8-10 km, and the majority of measurements for the column within it had precisions between 0.2 and 0.9 ppm.