Airborne lidar LEANDRE II for water-vapor profiling in the troposphere. I. System description

The airborne differential absorption lidar LEANDRE II, developed for profiling tropospheric water-vapor mixing ratios, is described. The emitter is a flash-lamp-pumped alexandrite laser, which operates in a double-pulse, dual-wavelength mode in the 727-736 nm spectral domain. Two 50-mJ successive on-line and off-line pulses with an output linewidth of 2.4 X 10(-2) cm(-1) and a spectral purity larger than 99.99% are emitted at a 50-mus time interval. The spectral positioning is controlled in real time by a wavemeter with an absolute accuracy of 5 X 10(-3) cm(-1). The receiver is a 30-cm aperture telescope with a 3.5-mrad field of view and a l-nm filter bandwidth. These instrument characteristics are defined for measuring the water-vapor mixing ratio with an accuracy better than 0.5 g kg(-1) in the first 5 km of the atmosphere with a range resolution of 300 m, integration on 100 shots, and an instrumental systematic error of less than 2%. The sensitivity study and first results are presented in part II [Appl. Opt. 40, 3462-3475 (2001)].. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.