Diode-pumped YAG portable lidar for field monitoring

An all-solid portable lidar system is desired as a prominent instrument for monitoring the atmospheric boundary layer, air pollution, plume dispersion, and other atmospheric phenomena. The authors constructed a portable lidar system using a diode pumped YAG laser as a light source. The diode pumped YAG laser, which was used in their system, has the average power of 70 mW, the repetition frequency of 0.5 KHz to 20 kHz, and the beam divergence of 5 mrad. This is the first portable lidar system using a diode-pumped YAG laser, or the first one using an AOM Q-switched diode-pumped YAG laser, to the authors' knowledge. This has become possible due to the use of a specially designed high speed digital processor which makes possible the processing of the data up to 30 kHz repetition frequency. From the point-of-view of the all solid system, an avalanche photo detector was used as an optical detector. This system has already been used for the measurement of dense fog intrusion and the visibility. >