All-fiber upconversion high spectral resolution wind lidar using a Fabry-Perot interferometer

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel all-fiber high spectral resolution wind lidar at 1550nm using a fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer and upconversion detectors, achieving accurate Doppler wind measurements with high spectral resolution and stability.

Contribution

The work introduces an all-fiber wind lidar system utilizing a fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer and upconversion detectors, enhancing spectral resolution and measurement stability for wind sensing.

Findings

Achieved continuous line-of-sight wind measurements with good agreement to ultrasonic sensors.

Demonstrated high spectral resolution and stability in wind velocity retrieval.

Standard deviation of wind speed measurement is 0.76 m/s at 1.8 km.

Abstract

An all-fiber, micro-pulse and eye-safe high spectral resolution wind lidar (HSRWL) at 1550nm is proposed and demonstrated by using a pair of upconversion single-photon detectors and a fiber Fabry-Perot scanning interferometer (FFP-SI). In order to improve the optical detection efficiency, both the transmission spectrum and the reflection spectrum of the FFP-SI are used for spectral analyses of the aerosol backscatter and the reference laser pulse. The reference signal is tapped from the outgoing laser and served as a zero velocity indicator. The Doppler shift is retrieved from a frequency response function Q, which is defined as the ratio of difference of the transmitted signal and the reflected signal to their sum. Taking advantages of high signal-to-noise ratio of the detectors and high spectral resolution of the FFP-SI, the Q spectra of the aerosol backscatter are reconstructed along the line-of-sight (LOS) of the telescope. By applying a least squares fit procedure to the measured Q spectra, the center frequencies and the bandwidths are obtained simultaneously. And then the Doppler shifts are determined relative to the center frequency of the reference signal. To eliminate the influence of temperature fluctuations on the FFP-SI, the FFP-SI is cased in a chamber with temperature stability of 0.001 during the measurement. Continuous LOS wind observations are carried out on two days at Hefei (31.843 N, 117.265 E), China. In the meantime, LOS wind measurements from the HSRWL show good agreement with the results from an ultrasonic wind sensor (Vaisala windcap WMT52). Due to the computational expensive of the convolution operation of the Q function, an empirical method is adopted to evaluate the quality of the measurements. The standard deviation of the wind speed is 0.76 m/s at the 1.8 km. The standard deviation of the retrieved bandwidth variation is 2.07 MHz at the 1.8 km.