Ramatoulie Bah
Shayla R. Brooks
Dana Brown
Linwood Creekmore
Torreon N. Creekmore
Vincent Augustus Davis
Peter Eley
Danielle Graves
Paula Harrell
Golar Newby
Elizabeth Rascoe
Carl W. Seward
Eunice Smith
Rodney Stewart
Nelson Veale
Jordan Williams

Torreon N. Creekmore
email: tcreekmore@umfort.cs.ecsu.edu

Mentor: Timothy Berkoff, Dr. Judd Welton, and V. Stanley Scott
Internship: GSFC Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Title: New Generation Micro-Pulse LIDAR (MPL): MPL-4

Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) is a power tool for understanding and studying the Earth’s atmosphere. The use of lasers in remote sensing helps scientists to take advantage of the unique attributes of laser light to measure properties of the Earth’s atmosphere. A typical LIDAR consists mainly of a laser, telescope receiver, detector, and a computer data analysis system. Most LIDARs use high powered laser systems and are not eye safe. With the advent of new compact eye safe LIDAR; known as Micro-Pulse LIDAR (MPL), scientists now have new capabilities to measure cloud and aerosol structures. Micro-Pulse LIDARs are different that traditional LIDARs in that they use a high repetition-rate laser at low pulse energies. And laser beam expansion to achieve eye-safe operation. A new generation type Micro-Pulse LIDAR called “MPL-4” was characterized and evaluated for use in full-time field monitoring. The new system incorporated a ruggedized telescope, new laser supply and data system, and fiber-coupled detection to improve performance and reliability. Comparisons of the MPL data with data from other systems were performed to show that the MPL-4 could produce accurate profiles of cloud and aerosol properties. LIDAR systems are used to profile atmospheric cloud and aerosol layers. The intended applications are measurements of the cloud and aerosol structures. This MPL system is the first of many to be deployed globally to replace older versions of the instrument in the worldwide network of MPL systems called Micro-Pulse LIDAR Network (MPL-Net). The primary goal of MPL-net is to provide long-term data sets of cloud and aerosol vertical distributions at key sites around the world, which will help validate and improve global and regional climate models and also serve as ground-truth sites for NASA/EOS satellite programs.