Re: Question about lidar and wind scanners.
LIDAR needs to reflect off of surfaces, giving distance to the point of intersection. It's essentially a raycast from an origin point within a field of view that generates ray intersection points within the frustum. In simple terms it generates clouds of points in 3d space where the laser reflects. It can be done on changing geometry, but it's a serious pain (ie the Radiohead video we did back in 2008) as there is no data coherence from sample to sample. Moreover, atmosphere will likely refract the laser instead of reflect, therefore I can't see it (in its current state) work for capturing wind currents.
One way that the atmosphere can be sampled and analyzed is the Adaptive Optics method used by astronomers. This takes a powerful laser exciting molecules in the upper atmosphere to reveal their fluid motion, which is translated to a complex series of mirrors that distorts the lens of the telescope to mitigate the effect of the atmosphere on optics.