Airborne-Based Doppler Lidar

The Twin Otter DWL

The Twin Otter Doppler Wind Lidar (TODWL) is an airborne DWL on ready for research operated by the PI and owned by the US Navy through its Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS). The instrument is installed in a Navy Twin Otter used for general atmospheric and oceanographic research. The lidar is a 2 micron coherent system. A defining capability of the TODWL is its ability to profile above, on and below the flight level. With its side door mounted, bi-axis scanner, the beam can be adaptively directed in a variety of scan patterns including conical, nadir stares and flight level stares.

• TODWL: An Airborne Doppler Wind Lidar for Atmospheric Research (pdf)
• Investigation of Flows Within Complex Terrain and Along Coastlines Using an Airborne Doppler Wind Lidar: Observations and Model Comparisons (pdf)
• Synergisms and comparisons between airborne Doppler Wind Lidar observations and other remote and in-situ wind measurements and model forecasts (pdf)

The P3 DWL

The P3 DWL uses the latest version of a coherent Doppler transceiver developed at Lockheed Martin Coherent Technologies. The scanner is a bi-axial scanner that enables pointing the beam in any direction within a +-30 degree azimuth window and +- 120 degree elevation window. The scanner design was critical to the success of the DWL’s participation in TPARC. The DWL was flown aboard a P3 aircraft in the western Pacific Ocean as part of the 2008 TPARC field experiment. One of the initial missions occurred on August 16th-17th, 2008 around Tropical Cyclone Nuri. 

In 2017 and 2018, the ADWL was flown on the NOAA Hurricane Reconnaissance P3 aircraft making DWL wind profile measurements around Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Lane, respectively.

• Doppler Lidar Wind Measurements Around Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Lane during NOAA Hurricane Reconnaissance Programs(pdf)

• Airborne Doppler Wind Lidar Investigations of Western Pacific Typhoon Genesis and Evolution(pdf)

• Impact of airborne Doppler wind lidar profiles on numerical simulations of a tropical cyclone (pdf)

During 25 May – 24 June 2017, NASA funded and conducted the Convective Processes Experiment (CPEX) which was based out of Ft. Lauderdale, FL and used a suite of instruments aboard a NASA DC-8 aircraft to investigate convective processes, life cycles and circulations over tropical waters. The featured instrument of CPEX was NASA’s Doppler Aerosol WiNd (DAWN) lidar but also included dropsondes, the Airborne Second Generation Precipitation Radar (APR-2), and other instruments. The CPEX campaign flew 16 missions over the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and has provided a unique set of wind, temperature and humidity measurements to be used in analysis and model assimilation and prediction studies.

SWA was responsible for the processing of all DAWN raw data and provided a unique set of both Line of Sight (LOS) and profile wind products. More than 5000 DAWN tropospheric and boundary layer wind profiles with horizontal resolutions of 3-15 km, vertical resolution of 33 m over a wide range of convective activity and atmospheric conditions were processed.  This data is being used by SWA and other researchers to study tropical convective activity, circulations and budget studies

Ground-Based Doppler Lidar

The Tornado Wind Observing Lidar Facility (TWOLF) is a mobile ground based DWL used in the VORTEX2 field program. TWOLF used much of the TODWL system with exceptions of a hemispherical scanner borrowed from ARL and modified software for +- 125m/s wind measurements.

• A Summary of Data Collected During Vortex2 by MWR-05XP/TWOLF, UMASS X-POL, and the UMASS W-Band Radar(pdf)