| Water vapor is one of the most important atmospheric variables that play a key role in air quality, global warming, climate change and hurricane formation. In this dissertation, use was made of two laser systems, the 248-nm KrF laser and the 355 nm Nd-YAG laser, with the use of Raman scattering to measure water vapor in the atmosphere. These two systems have been calibrated more accurately, using the LIDAR approach named SOLEX (Selected Overlap LIDAR Experiment). All the experiments were carried out at the Howard University Beltsville campus located on a 107 acre research site, at Beltsville, MD, 15 miles from downtown Washington DC, near the National Agricultural Research Center (NARC), and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The geographical coordinates are: 39°04.01'N latitude, and 76°52.31'W longitude. The receiver system used during these experiments is a 30" (76.2 cm), f/9 Cassegranian telescope, while the detector system uses a prism spectrometer (Beckman), with a 2-meter, double-fold optical path and a variable slit width is placed at the image plane of the telescope. With the use of the SOLEX system, this dissertation provides an accurate calibration of the two LIDAR Systems for water vapor measurement in the troposphere at the following ranges: 83.7 ft, 600 ft, 800 ft, 1000 ft and 1080 ft. Data analysis shows a pretty high sensitivity of the LIDAR system for water vapor measurement and the efficiency of the SOLEX method. |
