Performance Analysis of the Wind Field Estimation for a Very Fast Scanning Weather Radar

Abstract

The performance and limitations of the Doppler processing of the scattered signals from extended meteorological objects (precipitation) are analysed in the case of radar with fast azimuthal scanning. The classical method of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) has been applied to simulated weather radar signals to estimate the Doppler velocity spectrum and characterise it with the mean Doppler velocity and the Doppler spectrum width. The accuracy and resolution of these estimations have been analysed as a function of the scanning radar rotation speed. Finally, the performances of the 2D wind field retrieval are analysed in relation to the accuracy and resolution of Doppler spectra estimations. The wind field retrieval has been done using the classical velocity azimuthal display (VAD) retrieval technique that gives an overall/average estimate of the wind field over an observation region. A few possible approaches for improving the accuracy and resolution of a fast scanning weather radar Doppler signal processing are proposed and analysed based on simulated scanning radar data.