In order to get an estimation of its importance, we simulate the effect of the irradiance distribution of a laser beam on the overlap function of a lidar system. Five multi-modal and one Gaussian beam profiles were used and the overlap function was computed for each of them. We have calculated the errors, which are introduced to the lidar signals, while applying an overlap correction with a Gaussian beam profile instead of the actual one.
Siomos et al. (2026) studied this question.