Atmospheric Lidar Fundamentals: Laser Light Scattering from Atoms and Linear Molecules

Description

Lidar is a remote sensing technique that employs laser beams to produce a high-resolution, four-dimensional probe, with important applications in atmospheric science. Suitable as a detailed reference or an advanced textbook for interdisciplinary courses, this book discusses the underlying principles of light-scattering theory and describes widely used lidar systems in current research, exploring how they can be employed effectively for atmospheric profiling. This self-contained text provides a solid grounding in the essential physics of light-matter interactions and the fundamentals of atmospheric lidars through a discussion of the principles that govern light-matter interactions and an exploration of both historical and recent scientific developments in lidar technology. This is an essential resource for physicists, optical engineers and other researchers in atmospheric science and remote sensing.

Chiao-Yao She is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Colorado State University and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He has decades of experience in the area of atmospheric lidar physics, since obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964, and pioneered two narrowband atmospheric lidars that enabled important scientific investigations. He has an outstanding research and publication record including more than two hundred papers on related topics and two book chapters. Jonathan S. Friedman received his Ph.D. from Colorado State University in 1991 and is currently the Director of the Puerto Rico Photonics Institute, which he founded in 2011 at the Universidad Ana G. Mendez. For twenty six years, he was a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory for Cornell University, and at SRI International. In addition to developing and employing lidar technology to study the atmosphere, he has also published extensively in the field of lidar science and spectroscopic physics.