Progress Toward an Autonomous Field Deployable Diode Laser Based Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) for Profiling Water Vapor in the Lower Troposphere

Water vapor is the most dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and plays an important role in many key atmospheric processes associated with both weather and climate. Water vapor is highly variable in space and time due to large scale transport and biosphere-atmosphere interactions. Having long-term, high-resolution, vertical profiles of water vapor will help to better understand the water vapor structure and variability and its associated impact on weather and climate. A diode laser based differential absorption lidar (DIAL) for full-time water vapor and aerosol profiling in the lower troposphere has been demonstrated at Montana State University. This prototype instrument has the potential to form the basis of a ground based network of eye-safe autonomous instruments that can provide important information on the spatial and temporal variability of water vapor in the lower troposphere. To achieve this potential, major improvements to the prototype instrument need to be implemented and demonstrated including developing a laser transmitter capable of long term operation and modifying the optical receiver to make measurement below 0.5 km. During the past year, work on incorporating a new laser transmitter based on two distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) diode lasers, one operating at the on-line/side-line wavelength and the second operating at the off-line wavelength to injection seed a tapered semiconductor optical amplifier (TSOA) in a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration has been completed. Recent work on the optical receiver is driven by the fact that the majority of the atmospheric water vapor resides below 2 km. The current single channel DIAL receiver has a narrow field of view and does not come in to full overlap until approximately 2 km. A two channel DIAL receiver has been designed that will allow the DIAL to achieve full overlap at ranges of less the 0.5 km providing significant improvement to the instrument performance. A discussion of the improvements made to the DIAL instrument towards a networkable autonomous field instrument will be presented. The performance of the improved DIAL instrument will be presented through observational data. A comparison of the water vapor number density profiles retrieved from the DIAL instrument will be compared with Vaisala RS92 radiosondes as a means of validated the DIAL retrievals.