Title :
Clutter mitigation using auxiliary elements for the NWRT phased array radar
Author :
Le, K.D. ; Palmer, R.D. ; Cheong, B.L. ; Yu, T.-Y. ; Zhang, G. ; Torres, S.M.
Author_Institution :
Atmos. Radar Res. Center, Norman, OK
Abstract :
The national weather radar testbed (NWRT) has a 10-cm phased array radar that is used primarily for monitoring the weather. It is attractive compared to the current parabolic dish weather surveillance radar-88 Doppler (WSR-88D) because of its capability to electronically steer. When combined with the recently developed beam multiplexing technique that uses a small number of contiguous samples and clever spatial sampling, this radar can obtain very rapid update scans and is extremely advantageous in monitoring severe weather. However, the small number of contiguous samples makes filtering of the clutter signal problematic in the temporal/spectral domain and can limit the performance of this radar in clutter dominated conditions. By exploiting the spatial correlation of the auxiliary channel signals, the effect of clutter contamination can be reduced to overcome this problem. In this work, two spatial filtering techniques that use low-gain auxiliary receive channels are presented, and the effect of clutter mitigation is investigated using numerical simulations for a tornadic thunderstorm dominated by clutter return. Parameters under investigation include signal-to-noise ratio, clutter-to-signal ratio, number of time series samples, varying clutter spectral widths, and maximum weight constraints.
Keywords :
Doppler radar; filtering theory; interference suppression; meteorological radar; multiplexing; numerical analysis; phased array radar; radar clutter; search radar; spatial filters; Doppler radar; NWRT phased array radar; auxiliary channel signals; beam multiplexing technique; clever spatial sampling; clutter mitigation; clutter signal problematic filtering; clutter spectral widths; clutter-to-signal ratio; low-gain auxiliary receive channels; maximum weight constraints; numerical simulations; parabolic dish weather surveillance radar; signal-to-noise ratio; spatial correlation; spatial filtering techniques; temporal-spectral domain; tornadic thunderstorm; weather monitoring; weather radar testbed; Contamination; Doppler radar; Filtering; Meteorological radar; Monitoring; Phased arrays; Radar clutter; Sampling methods; Surveillance; Testing;
Conference_Titel :
Radar Conference, 2008. EuRAD 2008. European
Conference_Location :
Amsterdam
Print_ISBN :
978-2-87487-009-5