An Ultra-narrow Bandwidth Filter for Daytime Wind Measurement of Direct Detection Rayleigh Lidar

A Rayleigh Lidar used for wind detection works by transmitting laser pulses to the atmosphere and receiving backscattering signals from molecules. Because of the weak backscattering signals, a lidar usually uses a high sensitivity photomultiplier as detector and photon counting technology for signal collection. The capturing of returned extremely weak backscattering signals requires the lidar to work on dark background with a long time accumulation to get high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Because of the strong solar background during the day, the SNR of lidar during daytime is much lower than that during nighttime, the altitude and accuracy of detection are also restricted greatly. Therefore this article describes an ultra-narrow bandwidth filter (UNBF) that has been developed on 354.7 nm wavelength of laser. The UNBF is used for suppressing the strong solar background that degrades the performance of Rayleigh wind lidar during daytime. The optical structure of UNBF consists of an interference filter (IF), a low resolution Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) and a high resolution FPI. The parameters of each optical component of the UNBF are presented in this article. The transmission curve of the aligned UNBF is measured with a tunable laser. Contrasting the result of with-UNBF and with-IF shows that the solar background received by a Licel transient recorder decreases by 50 similar to 100 times and that the SNR with-UNBF was improved by 3 times in the altitude range (35 km to 40 km) compared to with-IF at 10:26 to 10:38 on August 29, 2018. By the SNR comparison at four different times of one day, the ratio-values are larger than 1 over the altitude range (2550 km) in general, the results illustrate that the SNR with-UNBF is better than that with-IF for Rayleigh Lidar during daytime and they demonstrate the effective improvements of solar background restriction of UNBF.