An integrated weather channel designed for an up-to-date ATC radar system

A new air traffic radar system, which integrates both aircraft detection and the weather power estimate, is presented. Both the target and the weather channels share some radar subsystems, such as antenna, transmitter, RF/IF receiver, etc. In addition, the weather channel is employed to detect aircraft, thus cooperating with the target channel, in the regions not affected by rain, combining the capabilities of linear and circular polarization. The weather channel provides rain reflectivity classification, accomplished after both temporal and spatial smoothing, so that the processor is unaffected by the presence of aircraft echoes, asynchronous and CW interferences. The effects of ground cluster on the estimate of low Doppler rain are minimized resorting to a Doppler filtering and to an incoherent clutter map, loaded in absence of rain (i.e. `clear day´ conditions). As the system is still at the prototype level, no field measurements are available; however, a lot of computer simulations have been performed and good results obtained