Application of a Simple Adaptive Estimator for an Atmospheric Doppler Radar

A simple method for estimating parameters of the Doppler spectrum of atmospheric signals is described. The method is based on an adaptive filter processing that has been widely used in telecommunications but rarely applied in measurements using atmospheric radars. The method has been tested using both synthetic and real data obtained by the radar profiler-Transportable Atmospheric Radar (TARA)-and the weather radar-International Research Centre for Telecommunications and Radar (IRCTR) Drizzle Radar (IDRA)-both developed by IRCTR. The method is compared with the traditional pulse-pair method and fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based methods, as well as with the IRCTR FFT-based method implemented in the TARA and IDRA processing including an additional noise clipping stage. The tests have demonstrated high efficiency of the adaptive filtering estimator under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. The applicability of adaptive estimations in radar meteorology and the limitations associated with a sample length are discussed.