Abstract: In order to satisfy the safety requirement of aircraft taking off and landing under bad weather conditions, a portable lidar visibility meter was designed based on the principle of atmospheric backscatter. Diode pumped solid-state laser with low pulse energy and high pulse repeat frequency and avalanche photo diode detector with low noise and high quantum efficiency were adopted to ensure the precision of system. Specially, the embedded computer was adopted as the core of system controlling and data processing and the timing control of system was realized. The field test results show that the system has high detection accuracy and the overall error is less than 15%. The results show that the system has high detection precision and can satisfy the safety requirements of International Civil Aviation Organization.