Airborne forward-pointing UV Rayleigh lidar for remote clear air turbulence detection: system design and performance.

A high-performance airborne UV Rayleigh lidar system was developed within the European project DELICAT. With its forward-pointing architecture, it aims at demonstrating a novel detection scheme for clear air turbulence (CAT) for an aeronautics safety application. Due to its occurrence in clear and clean air at high altitudes (aviation cruise flight level), this type of turbulence evades microwave radar techniques and in most cases coherent Doppler lidar techniques.

Performance evaluation for long-range turbulence-detection using ultraviolet lidar.

Clear-air turbulence could be detected at long range using a UV lidar. Because the vertical speed cannot be retrieved from Doppler shift analysis at long range, the turbulence detection is based on the measurement of molecular density fluctuation associated with the turbulent wind. After an optimization of the characteristics of the candidate UV lidar, we present an evaluation of the detection range and of the false alarm rate and missed alarm rate depending on the altitude and vertical velocity root mean square.