Sunday, 10 August 2003
Practical Aspects Of Wideband Reception and Processing in Dual-Polarized Weather Radars
In conventional radar systems the receiver bandwidth is designed to be similar to be bandwidth of the transmit pulse in order to maximize the signal to noise performance. However Torres and Zrnic (2001) have recently suggested oversampling the radar signals in range and whitening the range samples as a potential way to decrease the measured standard deviation of various radar signal parameters. For the whitening of the received waveform to be accurate, lot of details have to be addressed such as full knowledge of amplitude and phase of the transmitted pulse. This paper presents theoretical and experimental investigation of the procedure of oversampling in range (at a resolution smaller than pulse width). A method for implementing the whitening transformation is also suggested. It is shown that use of oversampling and whitening improve the quality of reflectivity estimates significantly in agreement with the theory but the improvement is not so conspicuous for all the polarimetric variables. Finally, an analysis done with data collected from CSU-CHILL Radar is presented with an intuitive explanation of the statistical behavior of various radar signal parameters.
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