Decorrelation in Range of Oversampled Weather Radar Signals Using FIR Filter

Whitening of oversampled signals in range has been recently proposed to improve the performance of spectral moment estimators on Doppler weather radars. The proven method decorrelates signals by grouping samples along range in blocks (i.e., vectors) and applying a whitening matrix to each block. Implementation of such matrix multiplication is suited for general purpose processors and custom hardware designs (e.g., FPGA). In some instances, however, the real-time implementation constraints can be such that different approach more suitable to the intrinsic hardware and/or software architecture/platform is preferred. Due to the inherent stability and ease of implementation, numerous signal processing platforms feature built-in Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters with programmable coefficients. This paper presents the pipelined approach using FIR filter that achieves data decorrelation close to that of the perfect whitening matrix filter.