Simultaneous temperature and wind profiling in the troposphere and lower stratosphere using a Rayleigh Doppler lidar with a Fizeau-interferometer-based high-spectral-resolution receiver

Simultaneous profiling of atmospheric wind and temperature is essential for investigating atmospheric dynamics and wave–mean flow interactions. However, conventional molecular Rayleigh lidar techniques generally retrieve temperature and wind using different measurement principles, such as hydrostatic integration for temperature retrieval and double-edge discrimination for wind measurement. Direct retrieval of both quantities from a single spectrally resolved molecular backscatter signal remains less commonly demonstrated, particularly in the troposphere and lower stratosphere. To explore this approach, we developed a high-spectral-resolution lidar (HSRL) receiver based on a Fizeau interferometer and a 32-channel linear photomultiplier-tube array. The receiver spatially resolves the Rayleigh–Brillouin (RB) spectrum across the detector array, enabling the Doppler shift and thermally induced spectral broadening to be determined from the same measured spectrum for joint wind and temperature retrieval without frequency scanning. Numerical simulations were first performed to optimize the spectral sampling characteristics of the receiver, identifying the 32-channel configuration as a favorable compromise between spectral resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over the 2 to 20 km altitude range. Wind profiles were retrieved from 2 to 20 km with a temporal resolution of 10 min, while temperature profiles were retrieved from 5.3 to 20 km with a temporal resolution of 5 min. Temperature retrieval was performed where the Mie scattering signal fraction was below approximately 8 %, which corresponded to a lower retrieval altitude of about 5.3 km under the observed atmospheric conditions. The vertical resolutions were 60 m below 10 km and 300 m above 10 km. Compared with radiosonde measurements, the retrieved temperatures showed mean absolute temperature differences of 1.19 K at 5.3–10 km and 2.10 K above 10 km. Below 5.3 km, wind retrieval used model temperature as an auxiliary input, yielding mean absolute differences of 2.34 and 2.50 m s −1 for the zonal and meridional wind components, respectively. In the fully lidar-based joint-retrieval region above 5.3 km, the corresponding wind differences were 1.84 and 2.97 m s −1 at 5.3–10 km and 3.02 and 3.08 m s −1 above 10 km. These results demonstrate that the proposed scan-free multichannel Fizeau-interferometer HSRL enables reliable temperature profiling from the middle troposphere to the lower stratosphere and extends wind measurements into the lower troposphere, while offering a compact spectral architecture with potential for future airborne and spaceborne Doppler lidar applications.