Geary Schwemmer and
David Miller
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
ABSTRACT
"New Scanning Lidar Technology Enables Boundary Layer, Cloud Coverage, and Wind Measurements"
Lidar instruments provide a wide range of atmospheric measurement capabilities including water vapor, ozone, and aerosol composition. Scanning extends the capabilities of lidar instruments to include, but not limited to, the measurement of wind, volume imaging, and target tracking. The reasons for scanning will be discussed. Several examples of scanning systems will be given to illustrate the possible scanning methods and their applications. The presenters will then focus on the Holographic Airborne Rotating Lidar Instrument Experiment (HARLIE) to illustrate the benefits of holographic scanning technology. Several data products have been developed using the unique measurement capabilities of HARLIE including boundary-layer height, cloud coverage, and wind measurements. These data products, including the processing techniques involved to make them, will be presented.
BIOGRAPHIES:
Geary Schwemmer is an Electronics Engineer in the Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. In 1976 he received a BS in EE at the University of Maryland in College Park in the Co-Op program, doing his internship with NASA at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It was there he began his career in lidar development and applications. As a Co-Op at Wallops, he helped to build, test, and use airborne remote sensing instruments including a multichannel ocean color sensor, a laser oil fluorosensor, and a laser bathymeter. Today he has 29 years of experience in laser and passive optical remote sensing techniques, instrument design and applications, applied molecular spectroscopy, project management, and laboratory and field experiment design and implementation. He has designed and built tunable alexandrite lasers, laser wavemeters, spectrometers, and numerous lidar systems. He is the PI for the HARLIE instrument and for the development of holographic scanning telescope technology, as well as Co-I on Meso- and Convective Scale Studies in IHOP utilizing his lidar data. Geary currently chairs the AMS Committee on Laser Atmospheric Studies, and in that capacity is organizing a short course on lidar for meteorologists and the establishment of a lidar museum.
David Miller is a research meteorologist in the Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He received his BS in Meteorology in 1996 and MS in Meteorology in 1998 from Penn State University. After a short stint at NOAA in Silver Spring he moved to Goddard where he has worked for the past five years. David has participated in six field missions with the HARLIE instrument providing both hardware and data processing support. He is also in charge of data management and product development using data collected using the HARLIE instrument.