Performance Improvement of Spaceborne Carbon Dioxide Detection IPDA LIDAR Using Linearty Optimized Amplifier of Photo-Detector

The spaceborne double-pulse integrated-path differential absorption (IPDA) light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system was found to be helpful in observing atmospheric CO2 and understanding the carbon cycle. The airborne experiments of a scale prototype of China’s planned spaceborne IPDA LIDAR was implemented in 2019. A problem with data inversion caused by the detector module nonlinearity was found. Through many experiments, the amplifier circuit board (ACB) of the detector module was proved to be the main factor causing the nonlinearity. Through amplifier circuit optimization, the original bandwidth of the ACB was changed to 1 MHz by using a fifth-order active filter. Compared with the original version, the linearity of optimized ACB is improved from 42.6% to 0.0747%. The optimized ACB was produced and its linearity was verified by experiments. In addition, the output waveform of the optimized ACB changes significantly, which will affect the random error (RE) of the optimized IPDA LIDAR system. Through the performance simulation, the RE of more than 90% of the global area is less than 0.728 ppm. Finally, the transfer model of the detector module was given, which will be helpful for the further optimization of the CO2 column-averaged dry-air mixing ratio (XCO2) inversion algorithm.