Monitoring and analysis of sea fog in an offshore waterway using lidar

Until now, sea fog monitoring relied mainly on point monitoring equipment, such as a forward scatter visibility sensor mounted on the shore or on an island, which produce non-ideal data during a variable and unevenly distributed sea fog. In 2019, a visibility lidar instrument for sea fog monitoring was installed in the Beilun area of the Ningbo Zhoushan Port, China. Two sea fog events were monitored in February 2020, and the data from the lidar were compared with those from a forward scatter visibility sensor. The results show that the visibility lidar instrument is advantageous for sea fog monitoring, and the correlation of the lidar instrument data with the forward scatter sensor data demonstrates the utility and potential of the lidar for sea fog detection. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License.