A survey of four major lidar inversion techniques

Abstract

Lidar, which is the acronym for light detection and ranging, is a remote sensing system that uses lasers for atmospheric probing. The results lead to the calculation of the atmosphere optical parameters, namely, the volume backscattering coefficient β and the atmospheric extinction coefficient, α. This paper presents different ways of extracting α and β from the lidar data and applies the appropriate techniques to the local lidar database. The calculated coefficients are significant because they uniquely characterize the atmosphere in this part of the world.