A CO2 Profile Retrieving Method Based on Chebyshev Fitting for Ground-Based DIAL

The vertical profile of atmospheric CO2 is of great scientific significance in identifying carbon sinks and sources, and estimating CO2 emissions or uptakes. Differential absorption Light Detection And Ranging (DIAL), has been widely accepted as the most promising technique to sense atmospheric CO2. The classical method to retrieve measurements, generated from range-resolved detection, is derived from differentiating the measured column content, but its performance in dealing with aerosol backscatter signals is poor. To address this issue, this paper proposes a derivative method, which is based on Chebyshev fitting to the measured differential absorption optical depth. We created a performance evaluation model to assess the performance of the proposed method. Simulations revealed that the error of a single CO2 profile in data retrieval can be reduced to less than 4 ppm in 6000 m. The precision of long-term mean CO2 profile is expected to be less than 1 ppm. We believe that this novel method can be used in other applications also, e.g., trace gas measurements collected using DIAL, especially when the signal-to-noise-ratio of received signal is small.