THE MULTICENTER AIRBORNE COHERENT ATMOSPHERIC WIND SENSOR

In 1992 the atmospheric Lidar remote sensing groups of the National Ae ronautics and Space Administration Marshall Space Flight Center, the N ational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Environmental Technolog y Laboratory (NOAA/ETL), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began a joi nt collaboration to develop an airborne high-energy Doppler laser rada r (lidar) system for atmospheric research and satellite validation and simulation studies. The result is the Multicenter Airborne Coherent A tmospheric Wind Sensor (MACAWS), which has the capability to remotely sense the distribution of wind and absolute aerosol backscatter in thr ee-dimensional volumes in the troposphere and lower stratosphere. A fa ctor critical to the programmatic feasibility and technical success of this collaboration has been the utilization of existing components an d expertise that were developed for previous atmospheric research by t he respective institutions. For example, the laser transmitter is that of the mobile ground-based Doppler lidar system developed and used in atmospheric research for more than a decade at NOAA/ETL. The motivati on for MACAWS is threefold: 1) to obtain fundamental measurements of s ubsynoptic-scale processes and features to improve subgrid-scale param eterizations in large-scale models, 2) to obtain datasets in order to improve the understanding of and predictive capabilities for meteorolo gical systems on subsynoptic scales, and 3) to validate (simulate) the performance of existing (planned) satellite-borne sensors. Initial fl ight tests were made in September 1995; subsequent flights were made i n June 1996 following system improvements. This paper describes the MA CAWS instrument, principles of operation, examples of measurements ove r the eastern Pacific Ocean and western United States, and future appl ications.