At the basis of the Raman lidar extinction inversion algorithm is the derivative of the logarithm of the ratio between the atmospheric nitrogen number density and the range-corrected Raman power return. While its computation is straightforward under ideal (noiseless) conditions, this is not the case under low signal-to-noise ratios, for which the observation noise may lead the logarithm to singular values. This work presents an analytical-statistical overview of the inversion problem and related error bars, tentative noise limiting criteria, and justifies the approximations at play to estimate the inversion error by means of error-propagation techniques for high signal- to-noise ratios. Simulation examples consider a 532/607-nm elastic-Raman system.

Peer Reviewed