Tristatic high resolution Doppler lidar to study winds and turbulence in the troposphere.

The implementation of a high resolution Doppler lidar (HRDL) to measure tropospheric winds and turbulence using a high resolution Fabry-Perot optical interferometer is considered. The Fabry-Perot detector system we have chosen is based on the one developed for passive wind measurements on board the Dynamics Explorer satellite. This is a stable high resolution system consisting of an optically contacted plane étalon and a multiring anode detector to scan spatially the image plane of the Fabry-Perot. The Doppler lidar proposed here consists of two transmitters and a receiver in a collinear arrangement. This system enables measurement of a horizontal and the vertical components of the wind in a common volume in space. The volume is determined by the intersection of the field of view of the receiver and the divergence of the laser beam.