Hardware Design And Field Experiments Of Airborne Lidar System For Oil Spill Monitoring

Oil spills is one of the most harmful pollution in the ocean. This dissertation presents an oceanographic lidar system for detecting oil spill, mainly consisted of five parts. The first part introduces the application and development of airborne oil slick fluorescence LIDAR system, and narrates the basic principle of measuring oil slicks by airborne oceanographic lidar.In the second part, the hardware architecture and the structure design of Multi-channel Oceanographic Fluorescence Lidar System for Oil Spill Monitoring (MOFLSOS) System was introduced. The third harmonic of a Nd:YAG laser (at 355nm) is used as the excitation source. The backscattered fluorescence collected by a 20cm Cassegrain telescope was dispersed by a diffraction grating spectrometer with the spectral range of 370-690nm. In the optical structure, the laser beam and the telescope are coaxial. The entire fluorescence spectrum was transformed into electrical signals by multi-channel photomultiplier tube (PMT) detector.Third part specifies the identification of oil type and the information extraction of oil films thickness based on some experiments carried out in the laboratory. The classification of oil samples is studied on the basis of the characteristics of fluorescence spectra. Estimation of oil film thickness was investigated using the water Raman signal.Fourth part depicts the field experiment of MOFLSOS system, which was carried out on Aug.27-28/2009 at a platform 125 meters high. A variety of lidar signals were received in daytime and night, and the targets were distinguished by analyzing the characteristics of fluorescence spectrum.The last part describes the flight experiment of MOFLSOS system. We compared the experimental data with MODIS satellite data, and the results show that the oil spill monitoring system owns the capability of detecting oil slicks and other objects according to their stimulated fluorescence.