Atmospheric precipitation sensing with a short-range C-band noise radar

The paper describes an experiment on atmospheric precipitation sensing with a ground-based, continuous-wave noise radar. The radar system was built from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) measurement equipment (Vector Signal Analyzer, Arbitrary Waveform Generator, amplifiers, antennas) and operated at 5.6 GHz in the C band. The result of the processing is a set of Range-Doppler plots containing visible echo of snow and rain. In case of snow measurements the radar worked as Multiple Input - Multiple Output (MIMO) in a polarimetric mode with simultaneous and continuous transmission and reception of different signals for horizontal and vertical polarization. In this paper the system setup, signal processing and results of measurements are presented.