ALIENS: atmospheric lidar end-to-end simulator

LabVIEW (National Instruments) provides a powerful instrumentation system for simulations, including an excellent graphical presentation environment. Our Doppler Lidar simulation tool contains signal propagation and scattering in the atmosphere, a model of the heterodyne front end in the low SNR-regime and a processing unit for signal digitizing and frequency estimation. As a consequence of LabVIEW's programming language, G, this end-to-end simulator for Laser Doppler wind measurement can run on either a Windows PC, a Macintosh PowerPC or a SUN station.