1.8 m/0.5 s Resolution Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar Using Continuous Phase Modulation

A high-spatial-resolution coherent Doppler wind lidar (CDWL) with high modulation efficiency is reported. The pseudo-random phase coding (PRPC) links the spatial resolution to the modulation rate but suffers from the non-rectangular transition caused by the limited bandwidth. With the help of continuous phase modulation (CPM), the abrupt phase switching between successive bit intervals is avoided, thus significantly reducing the bandwidth requirement. By mapping the binary sequence into different transition states rather than phase levels, a 10-fold modulation efficiency improvement is realized. In experiments, the performance of the proposed lidar is compared with lidars in the PRPC method and conventional non-coding method. Continuous radial wind profile measurement of 800 m is demonstrated with spatial and temporal resolution of 1.8 m and 0.5 s, which is the highest spatial resolution realized by a pulsed CDWL to our best knowledge.