Lidars are widely used for sensing of sea water turbidity and bottom depth. Our Makrel'-2 lidar has been used since the 1980s for water monitoring and searching for schools of fish over the Norwegian, Barents, and North seas. In the present paper, we discuss the results obtained with our lidar, placed onboard the Optik-E Antonov-30 aircraft- laboratory during our flight over Lake Baikal on November 2, 1996. Some results of lidar data processing are presented, which demonstrate the salient features of lidar return signals and the possibilities for lidar signal processing. The extinction index of the purest water found in the northern part of Lake Baikal was 0.12_MIN^PLU0.01 m^- (averaged over 600 pulses). In the region near the mouth of the River Selenga, the extinction index changed from 0.14 to 0.6 m^-. The minimum and maximum bottom depths recorded with our lidar are estimated. We detected bottom depths as great as 40 m when the aircraft flew near Bol'shoi Ushkanii Island.

Date Published: 13 January 1999
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 3583, Fifth International Symposium on Atmospheric and Ocean Optics, (13 January 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.337054

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3583:
Fifth International Symposium on Atmospheric and Ocean Optics
Vladimir E. Zuev; Gennadii G. Matvienko, Editor(s)