Alternative approaches to staggered PRT clutter filtering

Transmitting staggered PRT (pulse repitition time) is a well-established technique for extending the measured unambiguous velocity of weather radar signals. One drawback of the SPRT technique is the difficulty in clutter filtering the resulting unequally spaced time series samples. A computationally expensive and complicated technique has been proposed by Sachidananda and Zrnic (“Ground Clutter Filtering Dual-Polarized, Staggered PRT Sequences”, JTECH 2006) which uses signal processing for reconstruction of the missing samples in the SPRT sequences. Several new techniques, including two spectral-based and one time-domain based, are developed and compared to the “SACHI” technique. Results from simulations and from experimentally obtained data are presented.