Atmospheric Lidar

The Raman-Mie-Rayleigh (RMR) lidar is located in the Rome-Tor Vergata research area in 2 containers and can be used for both routine operations and campaigns by transporting it to the site of interest.

The system, designed at ISAC-CNR, emits pulses at the 2nd and 3rd harmonics, 532 and 355 nm respectively, of an Nd:YAG laser. The lidar receiver consists of a multichannel system, based on a set of 11 Newtonian telescopes (9 of which constitute a single virtual telescope) each channel characterized by a specific sensitivity and coverage of a specific portion of the atmosphere.

The system currently involves the acquisition of 8 backscatter signals at 4 wavelengths: 532 and 355 nm resulting from elastic scattering, and 387 and 407 nm, resulting from Raman scattering of the 355 nm pulse due to nitrogen and water vapor molecules, respectively.

With such information, inversion algorithms can be developed to study:

• Atmospheric aerosol;
• Clouds (particularly cirrus clouds);
• Water vapour;
• Temperature ((in the upper stratosphere-mesosphere).

Depending on the product and background radiation conditions, the system covers an altitude range from about 150 m to 80 km with a maximum possible resolution of 7.5 m and temporal sampling at 10 Hz.

• Operation: continuos
• Location: CIRAS – Rome
• Responsibile: Gian Luigi Liberti