Improved Diode-Laser Random-Modulation CW Lidar

Diode laser (DL) has the advantages such as compact size, small weight, small consumption power, low driving voltage, high power efficiency, easy handling of power and frequency modulation, long lifetime and low cost. Although the peak power is much smaller than that of the giant pulse solid-state laser (more than eight orders of magnitude), the average power is not so small. So the use of a cw-DL realizes a compact, reliable, practical, portable lidar system. Introducing the pseudo-random-modulation technique, we already reported the construction of a DL random-modulation cw (RM-CW) lidar and the successful operation of the nighttime aerosol measurement1),2). In this paper, we report the outline of the RM-CV lidar, the improvement of the DL RM-CV lidar, and the measurement of the daytime aerosol profile measurement as well as the nighttime one.