Obtaining global tropospheric vertical wind profiles by directly detecting atmospheric winds using space borne, airborne and/or ground station platforms is accomplished by a DASH interferometer in the back-end of a Doppler wind LIDAR. In the front-end of the Doppler wind LIDAR, a laser illuminates an atmosphere and a telescope collects backscattered laser light return signals from the laser illuminated atmosphere. The DASH interferometer processes return signals from the atmosphere, forming an interferogram and determines from the interferogram a Doppler shift of the return signals, which is equivalent to determining the line of sight wind speed of the Doppler wind LIDAR observation, by measuring the frequency shift caused by winds. From this determination, global and/or non-global atmospheric wind profile data are transmitted over a communications network in either real-time and/or non-real-time, to facilitate weather forecasting, weather modeling, weather avoidance navigation, atmospheric research, hurricane warnings, operations systems selections and deployment of operational assets.