Ocean atmospheric horizontal visibility measuring by a self-designed Mie-scattering Lidar

In this paper, we designed a compact Mie scattering lidar system for ocean-atmospheric horizontal visibility measuring and an algorithm used for obtaining the visibility of the aerosol. The effective range of our lidar system was from 300 m to 3 km with a 7.5-m horizontal range resolution and a 1-min time resolution. To reduce the uncertainty caused by using slope method which based on the hypothesis that either molecule or aerosol components exist in the atmosphere, we used the two-component fitting method to retrieve the aerosol extinction coefficient and the calculated the visibility based on Koschmieder’s theory. The whole system was powered by electricity supply which made it easy mounting on a ship or observation station by the sea. Lots of experiments were conducted laboratory to ensure the veracity and stability. In 2016 summer, we joined the cruise survey in China Bo-Hai and Huang-Hai Sea. Site experiments were carried out on the research vessel ‘Dongfanghong 2’. The results showed that the visibility values obtained by our system were in good agreement with the value set by the visibility meter and our lidar system was able to achieve visibility measuring under different weather conditions.