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Abstract
A sophisticated micro-pulse lidar (MPL) has been designed and developed for the study of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and clouds. The developed MPL uses a low energy pico-second pulsed Nd:YAG laser at 532 nm. The conventional receiver optic is used along with a photomultiplier tube in single photon detection mode. Stanford Research Systems' multi-channel scalar (MCS) is used with a personal computer for data acquisition. Due to the short laser pulse and a fast MCS, a spatial resolution of 0.75 m has been achieved. The control circuit has been designed to sense telescope cover status (open or closed) to avoid any mistakes in dark count and background data acquisition. The complete control software and Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed in Visual Basic. The lidar system has been tested both for its functionality to detect the variation in ABL and cloud height and also for its capability to acquire continuous night-time data without user interaction. In this article the design details and some preliminary results are discussed.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Director, NPL and the Head, RASD for providing the necessary facility and infrastructure to carry out the work. Thanks are also due for the financial support under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Emeritus Scientist Scheme (S.L. Jain and P.K. Dubey) and CSIR fellowship (Pavan S. Kulkarni).