OLE: A Novel Oceanic Lidar Emulator

Oceanic lidar is an effective tool for detecting water’s vertical structure. Cost-effective design of an oceanic lidar system and processing algorithms requires an effective lidar simulator. In this study, an oceanic lidar simulation tool was developed, which is available to the public ( https://github.com/soedchen/OLE ), and named the Oceanic Lidar Emulator (OLE). OLE is an improved semianalytic Monte Carlo-based lidar simulator, which has the capability of dealing with the physics of light propagating through wind-driven rough air–water interface into the ocean, being scattered by subsurface phytoplankton and reflected from the sea bottom, and returning to the lidar receiver. OLE has three main features: 1) it can deal with stratified water, while most existing lidar models can only be used for homogeneous water; 2) it can be applied to arbitrary scattering phase function (SPF) (e.g., Fournier–Forand or Petzold), while most existing lidar models can only use the Henyey–Greenstein SPF due to the difficulty of solving the inverse equation for the cumulative distribution function; and 3) it takes general consideration of lidar system observation geometry (e.g., receiver field of view, receiving aperture, altitude, incident angle, and so on) and environmental parameters (e.g., wind-driven rough water surface, vertical structure of water optical properties, and sea bottom albedo). We studied lidar extinction caused by multiple scattering and the effects of the SPF, rough sea surface, and stratified water, by comparing simulation results with measurements. These results demonstrated that our model is effective for oceanic lidar simulation.