For studying the effects of technical parameters of the airborne dual-wavelength Mie lidar on its detection performance, offering theoretic evidence for the lidar's design and development, the airborne Mie scattering lidar equation, appropriate atmospheric extinction model, as well as the design parameters of the lidar are used to calculate atmospheric backscattering signal profiles and the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)profiles received by the lidar. The effects of overlap function and different atmospheric models on the signal are discussed, and the influences of some technical parameters of the lidar on the SNR are analyzed, such as laser pulse energy, number of accumulated laser pulses, field of view, and filter bandwidth. The results show that the lidar with these design parameters is capable of detecting aerosol and clouds below 10 km altitude.