First attempts at measuring widespread smoke with a mobile LIDAR system

In the last years, the LIDAR technique has been successfully applied to the detection of the smoke plume emitted by wild fires. Up to now, the attention has been devoted to early detection of quite concentrated smoke plumes to reveal the first stage of fires as soon as possible. In this paper, it is shown how the LIDAR technique can also cope with widespread smoke, which can be the consequence of strong wind dispersion or non-concentrated sources. To this end, innovative signal processing techniques are required. The proposed approach is able to detect, in a reliable way, the presence of widespread smoke in the backscattered signals of compact LIDAR systems. The first experimental evidence is encouraging and the potential of the proposed method is presented.