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.

Design of a monolithic Michelson interferometer for fringe imaging in a near-field, UV, direct-detection Doppler wind lidar.

The low-biased, fast, airborne, short-range, and range-resolved determination of atmospheric wind speeds plays a key role in wake vortex and turbulence mitigation strategies and would improve flight safety, comfort, and economy. In this work, a concept for an airborne, UV, direct-detection Doppler wind lidar receiver is presented. A monolithic, tilted, field-widened, fringe-imaging Michelson interferometer (FWFIMI) combines the advantages of low angular sensitivity, high thermo-mechanical stability, independence of the specific atmospheric conditions, and potential for fast data evaluation.