A multi-wavelength Raman lidar system which includes both vibrational rotational Raman and Mie scattering spectra has been designed and described. A retrieval algorithm for water vapor and temperature has also been developed based on the potential observations from this Raman lidar system. The performance of this retrieval method and the new lidar system has been evaluated with a synthetic test. Using the U.S. standard atmosphere model and main parameters of this lidar system, we have obtained signal to noise ratio（SNR）of water-vapor backscatter signals under different circumstances of aerosol content, pulse emission energy and signal integration time. With the model calculated backscatter signals, both atmospheric water-vapor and temperature profiles have been retrieved and their uncertainties have been analyzed. These synthetic tests indicate that our new lidar system can obtain profiles of water-vapor and temperature at both day and night time, but with different detection heights. The retrieval algorithm shows less than 30% relative error for water vapor mixing ratio and good accuracy with a minimum detection of temperature less than 2 K.

Date Published: 20 November 2014
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9259, Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere, Clouds, and Precipitation V, 92590V (20 November 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2068632

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9259:
Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere, Clouds, and Precipitation V
Eastwood Im; Song Yang; Peng Zhang, Editor(s)