Abstract

Recently, there has been increased interest in the development of an all solid-state coherent lidar for remote wind sensing and the detection of windshears in front of aircraft. In the course of the development of a 1 μm Nd:YAG and a 2 μm Ho:YAG coherent Doppler lidar, we have experimentally measured that the effective receiver telescope aperture diameter may be reduced due to atmospheric turbulence effects for a near infrared coherent lidar operating near the ground.¹ In addition, our Monte-Carlo computer simulations of the atmospheric turbulence effects have indicated that this limitation could be reduced by the usage of a 2-dimensional (2-D) heterodyne detector array.² In this paper, we report the first experimental demonstration of enhanced heterodyne detection of a 1 μm Nd:YAG coherent Doppler lidar using a 2-D InGaAs multi-element heterodyne detector array.

© 1991 Optical Society of America