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New Pulsed Airborne Broadband Lidar for Greenhouse Carbon Dioxide Gas Sensing in the Earth’s Atmosphere

Elena Georgieva, Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology/UMBC, elena.m.georgieva@nasa.gov (Presenter)
William Heaps, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, william.s.heaps@nasa.gov
Wen Huang, Science Systems and Applications, wen.huang@nasa.gov

We report laboratory, field and initial airborne measurements of atmospheric CO2 using our novel broadband LIDAR operating at 1.5 microns spectral region and developed as a candidate for NASA’s ASCENDS mission. It is based on innovative new techniques employing a spectrally broad OPO laser source and using a Fabry-Perot interferometer in the detector part. The broadband lidar is capable of mitigating inaccuracy associated with atmospherically induced variations in CO2 absorption line shape and strength while demonstrating precision, sensitivity robustness / ruggedness, and stability. The Fabry-Perot solid etalon in the receiver part is tuned to match the wavelength of several CO2 absorption lines simultaneously. The receiver itself has been in development over the last few years at GSFC as a passive sensor to measure atmospheric CO2 column. It was tested during two successful flight campaigns. This new active approach reduces the number of individual different wavelength lasers required from three or more to only one, considerably reducing the risk of failure associated with multiple laser systems. The broadband technique also tremendously reduces the requirement for source wavelength stability, instead putting this responsibility on the Fabry- Perot based receiver. Laboratory, ground based and recent airborne results of the lidar system will be discussed. For the laboratory experiments we were using the OPO based system for 1.57 µm that has demonstrated pulse energies as high as 14.6 mJ per pulse, rep. rate of 15 Hz, 4 ns pulse duration over 2 nm spectral range. The fielded laser operates with ~60 mJ pulse energy in 5 ns pulses over a 1 nm spectral range. The instrument technology we are developing has a clear pathway to space and realistic potential to become a robust, simple and stable, low risk space measurement system.

Presentation: 2011_Poster_Georgieva_179_56.pdf (280k)

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Other   (Tue 11:30 AM)

Associated Project(s): 

  • Related Activity

Poster Location ID: 179

 


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