Micro-Doppler lidar signals and noise mechanisms: Theory and experiment

Lidar remote sensing of micro-Doppler signals is important for a large number of civilian and military applications. The single most important performance metric of these sensors is their velocity measurement precision. The velocity precision of a micro-Doppler lidar is limited by any one of various noise sources, which include shot-noise, local-oscillator frequency noise, speckle decorrelation noise, refractive turbulence advection noise and pointing jitter. In this paper, we present a theory, which describes these noise sources and their wavelength dependence. For example, it will be shown that the turbulence advection noise is wavelength independent while speckle decorrelation noise is proportional to the illumination wavelength and that the noise sources are, to a first-order, independent of the interrogation waveform classification (i.e., pulsed or CW). The results from recent field measurements using a doublet-pulse lidar will be compared with theory.