A low cost, telemetric LIDAR for the monitoring of PBL aerosols

An old-fashioned technology such as the "searchlight profiler", which was used in the 1960s for the pioneristic profiling of atmospheric backscatter (Rozenberg, 1960), has been revisited in our telemetric-LIDAR. The instrument is intended for the low-cost monitoring of aerosols, with a limited useful range of 100-200 meters. A modulated CW laser beam (532 nm) is used to probe the atmosphere. An 8-cm refractive telescope is used to collect the backscattered light, as in any ordinary LIDAR. A 10-nm bandwidth interference filter is used to block daylight, and a photodiode array placed in the focal plane of the lens is used as a detector. As in a telemetric system, the distance between the laser beam and the telescope determines the distance of the measurement volume for each photodiode pixel.