Evaluation of Doppler Correction Algorithm for EarthCARE Cloud Profiling Radar using Radar Echo Simulation

EarthCARE (Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer) carrying W-band Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) will be launched in 2018. A Doppler measurement function is one of the unique features of CPR/EarthCARE and new algorithm is needed to estimate vertical Doppler velocity with good accuracy from CPR. Since the satellite moves horizontally with very high speed, horizontally inhomogeneous reflectivity causes significant Doppler error due to contamination of satellite velocity. In the previous conference, we proposed a concept to correct this Doppler error. In order to correct horizontally integrated Doppler estimation, we calculated weighting function of reflectivity and/or pulse-pair covariance that contributes inhomogeneous reflectivity Doppler error. In this presentation, we re-examine an error factor that came from pulse-pair estimation itself (asymmetric Doppler spectrum) and evaluate Doppler error correction with pulse-pair covariance using various simulated reflectivity distribution.