All‐fiber pulse coherent Doppler LIDAR and its validations

Abstract. An all‐fiber pulsed coherent Doppler LIDAR (CDL) system is described. It uses a fiber laser as a light source at a 1.54‐μm wavelength, producing 200  μJ pulses at 10 kHz. The local oscillator signal is mixed with the backscattered light (of different frequency) in the fiber. The atmospheric wind speed is determined through the fast Fourier transform applied to the difference frequency signal acquired by an analog‐to‐digital converter card. This system was used to measure the atmospheric wind above the upper‐air meteorological observatory in Rongcheng (37.10°N, 122.25°E) of China between January 7 and 19, 2015. The CDL data are compared with sounding‐ and pilot‐balloon measurements to assess the CDL performance. The results show that the correlation coefficient of the different wind‐speed measurements is 0.93 and their discrepancy 0.64  m/s; the correlation coefficient for wind‐direction values is 0.92 and their discrepancy 5.8 deg. A time serial of the wind field, which benefits the understanding of atmospheric dynamics, is presented after the comparisons between data from CDL and balloons. The CDL system has a compact structure and demonstrates good stability, reliability, and a potential for application to wind‐field measurements in the atmospheric boundary layer.