The Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar. Part II: Green OAWL (GrOAWL) Airborne Performance and Validation

AbstractA two-look airborne Doppler wind lidar operating at the 532-nm laser wavelength, the Green Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar (GrOAWL), was built and flown aboard the NASA WB-57 research aircraft. Flight campaign goals were to validate the instrument wind measurements and to demonstrate the two-look measurement concept proposed for spaceborne mission concepts such as the Atmospheric Transport, Hurricanes, and Extratropical Numerical Weather Prediction with the Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar (ATHENA-OAWL) mission. The GrOAWL-measured winds were compared with collocated dropsonde measurements. Line-of-sight velocity (LOSV) measurements for the individual GrOAWL looks showed excellent agreement with dropsondes (R2 > 0.9). The LOSV biases were very small and not statistically different from 0 m s−1 at the 95% confidence interval (−0.07 ± 0.07 m s−1 and 0.01 ± 0.07 m s−1 for look 1 and look 2, respectively). The wind speed and direction profiles retrieved by combining the two GrOAWL looks were also i...