ASSESSMENT OF LIDAR INVERSION ERRORS FOR HOMOGENEOUS ATMOSPHERES

The inversion of lidar returns from homogeneous atmospheres has been d one customarily through the well-known slope method. The logarithmic o peration over the range-corrected and system-normalized received signa l used in this method introduces a bias in the statistics of the noise -affected processed signal that can severely distort the estimates of the atmospheric attenuation and backscatter coefficients under measure ment. It is shown that a fitting of the theoretically expected exponen tial signal to the range-corrected received one, using as the initial guess the results provided by the slope method and a least-squares ite rative procedure, can yield enhanced accuracy under low signal-to-nois e ratios and especially in moderate-to-high extinction conditions. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.