Designing for TARA: The radar control unit

This thesis describes the work done on a control system for the Transportable Atmospheric RAdar (TARA), which is located at the Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmosperic Research (CESAR). It describes the way in which this radar control unit was implemented within the TARA, by making use of a high-level programming language. The control unit...

The impact of droplets’ clustering on the radar backscattering from water clouds

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the clustering effect of droplets in the water clouds. The initial motivation came from the incapability of millimeter-wave cloud radars to always detect low-level liquid water clouds. The observed discrepancy between the value of radar reflectivity factor estimated by radar measurements and the...

Retrieving the Median Volume Diameter with a Polarimetric Cloud Radar

The knowledge of the raindrop size distribution is key for characterizing precipitation. It is however still a challenge to retrieve it with radars. Several polarimetric and spectral techniques are proposed for cm-wavelength radars (weather radars). What about the mm-wavelength radars (cloud radars), which have a better spatial and time...

Peering into the Heart of Thunderstorm Clouds: Insights from Cloud Radar and Spectral Polarimetry

Lightning is a natural phenomena that can be dangerous to humans. It is however challenging to study thunderstorm clouds using direct observations since it can be dangerous to fly into thunderstorm clouds. In this study, cloud radar with millimeter wavelength is used to study the properties and dynamics of thunderstorm clouds. It is based on a...

Dealiasing of radar Doppler velocities to improve wind estimations

With its three beams in different directions, the Transportable Atmospheric RAdar system (TARA) can provide a wind field estimation. These estimations are inaccurate when the Doppler velocities in one or more of the three beams are aliased. Amongst different approaches to solve aliasing are a continuity check up to four dimensions, staggering...

Weather radar data processing: A new technique to filter nonhydrometeors and a new methodology to evaluate filtering techniques without ground truth

Accurate rainfall intensity measurements are important to many applications like weather monitoring and forecasting, economics, urban design, agriculture and so on. A weather radar is one of the instruments to measure rainfall by reflected microwave signal from raindrops. However, the rainfall rate estimated by weather radar has various errors...

Microphysical Retrievals in Mixed-Phase Clouds with low LWP using Cloud Radar

Mixed-phase clouds, which have a significant impact on the global climate, are complex systems where liquid water and various types of ice particles coexist at temperatures below the freezing point. A key process in mixed-phase clouds is riming which alters microphysical and scattering properties of ice particles. Cloud radar is a powerful...

Dealiasing of Doppler spectra for cloud radar at 94 GHz