arXiv subjects

Willem J. Marais

Publications and source records attributed to Willem J. Marais.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Development of a Photon-Counting Deadtime Noise Model that Extends Dynamic Range and Resolution in Atmospheric Lidar

This work derives and validates a noise model that encapsulates deadtime of non-paralyzable detectors with random photon arrivals to enable advanced processing, like maximum-likelihood estimation, of high resolution atmospheric lidar profiles while accounting for deadtime bias. This estimator was validated across a wide dynamic range at high resolution (4 millimeters in range, 17 milliseconds in time). Experiments demonstrate that the noise model outperforms the current state-of-the-art for very short time-of-flight (2 nanoseconds) and extended targets (1 microsecond). The proposed noise model also produces accurate deadtime correction for very short integration times. This work sets the foundation for further study into accurate retrievals of high flux and dynamic atmospheric features, e.g., clouds and aerosol layers.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Global Estimation of Range Resolved Thermodynamic Profiles from MicroPulse Differential Absorption Lidar

We demonstrate thermodynamic profile estimation with data obtained using the MicroPulse DIAL such that the retrieval is entirely self contained. The only external input is surface meteorological variables obtained from a weather station installed on the instrument. The estimator provides products of temperature, absolute humidity and backscatter ratio such that cross dependencies between the lidar data products and raw observations are accounted for and the final products are self consistent. The method described here is applied to a combined oxygen DIAL, potassium HSRL, water vapor DIAL system operating at two pairs of wavelengths (nominally centered at 770 and 828 nm). We perform regularized maximum likelihood estimation through the Poisson Total Variation technique to suppress noise and improve the range of the observations. A comparison to 119 radiosondes indicates that this new processing method produces improved temperature retrievals, reducing total errors to less than 2 K below 3 km altitude and extending the maximum altitude of temperature retrievals to 5 km with less than 3 K error. The results of this work definitively demonstrates the potential for measuring temperature through the oxygen DIAL technique and furthermore that this can be accomplished with low-power semiconductor-based lidar sensors.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2016

A New Approach to Inverting Backscatter and Extinction from Photon-Limited Lidar Observations

Atmospheric lidar observations provide a unique capability to directly observe the vertical column of cloud and aerosol scattering properties. Detector and solar background noise, however, hinder the ability of lidar systems to provide reliable backscatter and extinction cross-section estimates. Standard methods for solving this inverse problem are most effective with high signal-to-noise ratio observations that are only available at low-resolution in uniform scenes. This paper describes a novel method for solving the inverse problem with high-resolution, lower signal-to-noise ratio observations that are effective in non-uniform scenes. The novelty is twofold. First, the inference of the backscatter and extinction are done on images, whereas current lidar algorithms only use the information content of single profiles. Hence, the latent spatial and temporal information in the noisy images are utilized to infer the cross-sections. Second, the noise associated with photon-counting lidar observations can be modeled using a Poisson distribution, and state-of-the-art tools for solving Poisson inverse problems are adapted to the atmospheric lidar problem. It is demonstrated through photon-counting High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) simulations that the proposed algorithm yield inverted backscatter and extinction cross-sections (per unit volume) with smaller Mean Squared Error (MSE) values at higher spatial and temporal resolutions, compared to the standard approach. Two case studies of real experimental data are also provided where the proposed algorithm is applied on HSRL observations and the inverted backscatter and extinction cross-sections are compared against the standard approach.

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