Variational Analysis for Airborne Conically Scanned Doppler Lidar to Retrieve Mesoscale Wind Fields

Abstract

An airborne pulsed Doppler lidar implementing a downlooking conical scan rotating around the vertical axis is under development. The information contained in the measured radial velocities is studied to assess the capacity to retrieve the 3D wind field at mesoscale. First, in the frame of a variational analysis, it is shown that the observations cannot resolve horizontal scales shorter than approximately 5 km. Then, constraints of mass conservation and regularity as well as various boundary conditions are added to improve the resolution. The various constraints are tested on synthetic data. Further, a full analysis scheme is proposed that combines a preanalysis at low resolution followed by a finer resolution analysis. The achievable performances are discussed as well as the main limitations.