Development and Observation of the Ku-band Broad-Band Radar for Meteorological Application

Hazardous weather such as severe storms, tornadoes and hurricanes are small scale weather phenomena whose detailed profiles are important practically and scientifically. Despite this, conventional radars cannot resolve them, because of their low resolution capability. In this study, we developed a new high resolution Ku-band Doppler radar with scanning capability for meteorological applications. With the new radar system design, the radar can accurately measure the radar reflectivity factor with the range resolution of 4 m and the time resolution of 1 min per 1 volume scan from the nearest range of 50 m to about 15 km for 10 W power using pulse compression technique. In this paper, the details of the system design and the signal processing algorithm are described. To demonstrate the accuracy of this system, the radar reflectivity measurements are compared with 2D-video disdrometer measurements. The initial observation results of spiral mode are also shown.