Lidar system for remote environmental studies

Light detection and ranging (lidar) system has been developed for remote monitoring of the environment. The system has been tested for measuring the size of clouds and by measurement of differential absorption due to pollutant gases like NO2 and SO2 in a cell. The lidar measurements revealed strong scattered signals from clouds situated around 11 km above the earth surface. The lidar data indicates that cloud thickness varied from 0.8 to 3.6 km at various times.