Experimental Calibration of the Overlap Factor for the Pulsed Atmospheric Lidar by Employing a Collocated Scheimpflug Lidar

Abstract

Lidar techniques have been widely employed for atmospheric remote sensing during past decades. However, an important drawback of the traditional atmospheric pulsed lidar technique is the large blind range, typically hundreds of meters, due to incomplete overlap between the transmitter and the receiver, etc. The large blind range prevents the successful retrieval of the near-ground aerosol profile, which is of great significance for both meteorological studies and environmental monitoring. In this work, we have demonstrated a new experimental approach to calibrate the overlap factor of the Mie-scattering pulsed lidar system by employing a collocated Scheimpflug lidar (SLidar) system. A calibration method of the overlap factor has been proposed and evaluated with lidar data measured in different ranges. The overlap factor, experimentally determined by the collocated SLidar system, has also been validated through horizontal comparison measurements. It has been found out that the median overlap factor evaluated by the proposed method agreed very well with the overlap factor obtained by the linear fitting approach with the assumption of homogeneous atmospheric conditions, and the discrepancy was generally less than 10%. Meanwhile, simultaneous measurements employing the SLidar system and the pulsed lidar system have been carried out to extend the measurement range of lidar techniques by gluing the lidar curves measured by the two systems. The profile of the aerosol extinction coefficient from the near surface at around 90 m up to 28 km can be well resolved in a slant measurement geometry during nighttime. This work has demonstrated a great potential of employing the SLidar technique for the calibration of the overlap factor and the extension of the measurement range for pulsed lidar techniques.