Real-Time Synchronous Acquisition and Processing of Signal in Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar Using FPGA

Coherent Doppler wind lidar has become a primary remote sensing technique for measuring atmospheric wind fields in recent years. However, the high bandwidth of the time domain echo signal has limited real-time data acquisition and processing. In this work, we propose a real-time data acquisition and preprocessing integrated solution. This approach is implemented using on-chip system field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware while utilizing a 7-channel base-4 polyphase fast Fourier transform calculation module and a pipelined structure operation. Within a 1 s data collection time, the real-time rapid acquisition and spectral preprocessing of lidar echo signals at a range of 9.9 km can be achieved. We compare the observation data with the measurement data from Windcube100s and radiosondes, and the results indicate that the coherent wind lidar developed in this paper can detect heights above 4.0 km, with effective data acquisition rates of 82% and 61% in the height ranges of 1500–2000 m and 2000–2500 m, respectively. At the height range of 3.5 km, the correlations for horizontal wind speed and direction measured by the lidar were all above 0.99, with the wind speed and direction measurement deviations being better than 0.56 m/s and 8.40∘, respectively.