Fusion of the pulsed lidar and the Scheimpflug lidar for full tropospheric aerosol sensing

• A blind-range compensation scheme for the pulsed lidar is proposed, where the pulsed and Scheimpflug lidar are fused. • The blind range is decreased to 60 m by configurating the system structure, thereby the detection range is extended. • The inversion method for aerosol optical parameters of the Mie lidar and Raman-Mie lidar are investigated. Due to incomplete overlap between the field-of-view of the receiver and the transmitted laser beam, the pulsed atmospheric lidar, based on the time-of-flight principle exhibits relatively large blind range and transition range, limiting its detection performance in the near field. This paper proposes a novel low-blind-range lidar for aerosol sensing by fusing the Raman-Mie lidar and the Scheimpflug lidar into a single setup. The blind range after compensation is reduced to 60 m, which can be further shortened by employing a longer area image sensor. The lidar overlap factor and signal splicing schemes have been developed to obtain low-blind-range lidar profiles. Aerosol extinction coefficient, backscattering coefficient, etc., have been obtained from the blind-range compensated lidar signals for the pure Mie lidar and the Raman-Mie lidar, respectively. The promising results demonstrate that the fusion of the pulsed lidar and the Scheimpflug lidar can successfully extend the detection range of the lidar technique.