Evaluation of coherent Doppler lidar velocity estimators in nonstationary regimes

We evaluate the mean velocity estimator performance for coherent Doppler lidar measurements of wind fields with wind shear and nonuniform system response as a function of target range. Performance of the velocity estimates is characterized by the bias and standard deviation that are determined by computer simulations. Results are for solid-state lasers with a Gaussian transmitted pulse. We consider data with high signal energy that produces negligible random outliers.