Simulation in the time domain for heterodyne coherent laser radar

A feuilleté model for assessment of the performance of heterodyne coherent laser radar (HCLR) under nonstationary atmospheric conditions such as wind shear and a fine layering of scattering properties is proposed. The model is an end-to-end signal simulation in the time domain at intermediate frequency from beam propagations to signal processing. The model takes into account the full transversedimension of the problem of laser-atmosphere interaction. The scatterers are grouped into slices, then an integration is performed over the slices that contribute to the HCLR signal. Two applications are presented: wind-shear detection for 10-µm HCLR and wind-vortex detection for 2-µm HCLR.