SIMULATION IN THE TIME-DOMAIN FOR HETERODYNE COHERENT LASER-RADAR

A feuillete model for assessment of the performance of heterodyne cohe rent laser radar (HCLR) under nonstationary atmospheric conditions suc h as wind shear and a fine layering of scattering properties is propos ed. The model is an end-to-end signal simulation in the time domain at intermediate frequency from beam propagations to signal processing. T he model takes into account the full transverse dimension of the probl em of laser-atmosphere interaction. The scatterers are grouped into sl ices, then an integration is performed over the slices that contribute to the HCLR signal. Two applications are presented: wind-shear detect ion for 10-mu m HCLR and wind-vortex detection for 2-mu m HCLR.