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ECE 583Lecture 19

LIDARLight Detection and Ranging

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Applications and Importance of Lidar

Lidar observations of clouds from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System satellite mission October 2003

•Global Cloud and Aerosol Distribution and Influence•Surface Altimetry - Changes in Ice Sheets•Elevation Mapping – Vegetation Height•Ocean Turbidity, Bathymetry•Global PBL Heights, Pollution•Water Vapor and Temperature Profiling•Measurement of Winds in the Free Troposphere•Global Winds

Climate Change

Weather/StormForecasting

Commercial

Biosphere

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UW Lidar - 1Armed with knowledge from some SRI lidar papers, a visit to SRI to see a real lidar and talk with M.G.H. Ligda and R.T. H. Collis, an Edmund Scientific catalog, John Reagan as a graduate student who “doesn’t know what he really doesn’t know,” builds one of the first lidars. The 6"primary mirror for the receiver had originally been hand-ground for an amateur telescope project.

Lidar became fully operational in 1966.From Dissertation of J.A. Reagan

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(watts)

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