Daytime Performance of the Lamp Rayleigh/Raman Lidar System
Document ID: 100
Master's Thesis
The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abstract
The daytime performance of the LAMP (Laser Atmospheric Measurement Program) has been characterized and will be presented. The construction of the LAMP system was completed at Penn State University during the summer of 1991. It was developed to measure molecular density from the ground to 80 km, and concentrations of nitrogen (N2) and water vapor (H2O) from the ground to 35 km and 5 km, respectively. These measurements were to be obtained initially at night and eventually into daylight conditions. An introduction to the LAMP system, as well as scattering, filtering, and LOWTRAN 7 atmospheric modeling fundamentals are presented. Several day-sky background reduction techniques are compared and the potential effectiveness of each method is discussed. The performance of the LAMP system under daylight conditions is shown with different system configurations for comparison. In addition, future upgrades to improve the daytime performance of the LAMP system are outlined. The daytime analysis of the LAMP system emphasizes several daylight performance enhancing techniques such as limiting the field of view of the telescope, use of narrowband filters, high blocking filters, and the exploitation of the solar blind region by using the 4th harmonic from of the Nd: YAG at 266 nm, and the effect on overall system operation to produce an improved instrument.
| Citation: | D. W. Machuga, "Daytime Performance of the Lamp Rayleigh/Raman Lidar System", The Pennsylvania State University, Master's Thesis, May 1993, 82 pages |