Improvements to the North Slope and AMF2 HSRL systems
Authors
Edwin W. Eloranta — University of Wisconsin
Martin Lawson — University of Wisconsin
Ilya I Razenkov — University of Wisconsin
Joseph Palani Garcia — University of Wisconsin
Category
Instruments
Description
The calibration stability of the ARM North Slope of Alaska (NSA) and second ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2) high spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) systems have been substantially improved by replacing the vendor-supplied seed laser controller with a unit of our own design. The seed lasers have also been modified to reduce sensitivity to environmental temperature and to provide feedback control of the pump diode power.Additional improvement has been achieved with a new frequency-locking scheme in the AMF2 system. Modification of critical mirror mountings in the AMF2 transmitter appears to have eliminated a puzzling humidity-correlated optical alignment drift. We plan to implement these improvements in the NSA system on our next maintenance trip.
These upgrades and the resulting improvement in HSRL performance will be described.