Lidars - Introduction

• Lidars (Light Dectection and Ranging) operate similar to a Doppler radar.  
• They transmit pulses of radiation, measuring the backscattered energy and the Doppler shift (similar to the 88-D).
• The lidar beam, however, is very narrow, since it is basically a laser beam of visible or infrared radiation (very short wavelength).
• The primary source of scatterers for a lidar are atmospheric aerosols and for some lidars, air molecules.  Recall that the wavelength for the lidar transmitted energy is near/in the visible spectrum.