New Lidar technology for aerosol measurements and extinction coefficient inversion

This paper presents new Lidar technology with which to remove the noise effect in aerosol extinction coefficient inversion, thereby yielding coefficients with high accuracy. Based on the Lidar principle, the new inversion method is calculated theoretically. As a case study, aerosols were measured regularly using Mie Lidar in the northern suburbs of Nanjing City, China, using the new method to calculate the aerosol extinction coefficient. The laser source energy was varied to obtain Lidar return signals with different intensities, which were then used to remove the noise effect, yielding inverse aerosol extinction coefficients with high accuracy. A numerical simulation was performed to examine the aerosol extinction coefficients calculated using Lidar return signals with different laser powers. The simulation results reveal that the different laser energies yield identical profiles of inversed aerosol extinction coefficients, consistent with the experimental results. The experimental and simulation results demonstrate the validity of the theoretical calculations.