Abstract

Coherent Doppler lidars have been used extensively over the past decade to measure a variety of atmospheric phenomena such as clear air turbulence, wake vortices, and boundary layer winds. For the most part, these systems have been either ground-based or non-scanning airborne systems. To overcome these limitations, the NASA-MSFC Airborne Doppler Lidar System has been developed which combines the flexibility of a scanning system with the mobility of an aircraft platform to produce in real time a two-dimensional vector wind velocity (Bilbro et al., 1982).