The Influence of Solar Illumination on the Sensitivity of Passive Lidar for Reception of The Scattered Laser Radiation

Abstract

We solve the problem of determining the power of the received scattered optical radiation from external laser beams, which propagate in the Earth’s atmosphere, by passive lidar in a weakly turbid transparent atmosphere and also determine the lidar operation radius. Under the night conditions without solar illumination, the lidar operation radius can exceed 2300 km when detecting the beams with powers is about 100 kW. In the presence of solar illumination, the operation radius decreases by an order of magnitude. For a small power of the external beam, the experimental and theoretical data are in good agreement, which makes it possible to extrapolate the obtained theoretical results to larger powers of the external beams with allowance for the radiation loss because of the secondary Rayleigh scattering.