Three-Dimensional Wind Measurements with the Fibered Airborne Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar LIVE

A three-dimensional (3D) wind profiling Lidar, based on the latest high power 1.5 mu m fiber laser development at Onera, has been successfully flown on-board a SAFIRE (Service des Avions Francais Instrumentes pour la Recherche en Environnement) ATR42 aircraft. The Lidar called LIVE (Lldar VEnt) is designed to measure wind profiles from the aircraft down to ground level, with a horizontal resolution of 3 km, a vertical resolution of 100 m and a designed accuracy on each three wind vector components better than 0.5 m.s(-1). To achieve the required performance, LIVE Lidar emits 410 mu J laser pulses repeating at 14 KHz with a duration of 700 ns and uses a conical scanner of 30 degrees total opening angle and a full scan time of 17 s.