A status report on the integration and test of the new multi-channel receiver at the National Weather Radar Testbed

This report describes the installation progress and initial testing for a project to add an eight channel receiver to the National Weather Radar Testbed (NWRT) system in Norman, Oklahoma. In particular, the hardware aspects of the RF down-conversion, RF switching, and digital receivers will be discussed. This will include a detailed discussion of the analog down-conversion sub-assembly and its design strategy. Initial test data from the system's multi-channel digital receiver will also be presented and discussed.

The multi-channel receiver will collect signals from the sum, azimuth-difference, elevation-difference, and five broad-beamed auxiliary channels. The report will describe the quality of initial primary channel data to be used for direct implementation of interferometry techniques to estimate crossbeam wind, shear and turbulence within a radar resolution volume. We will also show results of auxiliary channel data applied to clutter mitigation and advanced array processing algorithms to produce high quality weather signals with short dwell times. Potential benefits of this Multi-Channel Receiver configuration is greatly reduced observation times to produce high quality and high resolution data. New algorithms can allow real time, staring beam estimations of angular shear and turbulence include better understanding of storm dynamics and convective initiation, as well as better detection of small-scale phenomena including tornado and microbursts.

The project is a collaborative effort between the university and federal scientists. Assembly and testing of the instrument will be accomplished in the OU Atmospheric Radar Research Center (ARRC)'s Radar Innovation Laboratory (RIL) prior to integration into the NWRT. Scientists from the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) have taken an active role in the integration of this instrument. The conference presentation will discuss this new project at OU in greater detail, which includes: advanced meteorological applications, predicted laboratory findings, final designs, risk mitigation strategies, and potential look-ahead plans for real-time computations. This eight channel development is being supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.