Correction of temperature influence on the wind retrieval from a mobile Rayleigh Doppler lidar

A mobile Rayleigh Doppler lidar based on double-edge technique is implemented for simultaneously observing wind and temperature at heights of 15 km-60 km away from ground. Before the inversion of the Doppler shift due to wind, the Rayleigh response function should be calculated, which is a convolution of the laser spectrum, Rayleigh backscattering function, and the transmission function of the Fabry-Perot interferometer used as the frequency discriminator in the lidar. An analysis of the influence of the temperature on the accuracy of the line-of-sight winds shows that real-time temperature profiles are needed because the bandwidth of the Rayleigh backscattering function is temperature-dependent. An integration method is employed in the inversion of the temperature, where the convergence of this method and the high signal-to-noise ratio below 60 km ensure the accuracy and precision of the temperature profiles inverted. Then, real-time and on-site temperature profiles are applied to correct the wind instead of using temperature profiles from a numerical prediction system or atmosphere model. The corrected wind profiles show satisfactory agreement with the wind profiles acquired from radiosondes, proving the reliability of the method.