Improved procedure to correct airborne Doppler radar data

The airborne Doppler velocities contain not only the meteorlogical components but also the platform motion. Therefore, the platform motion has to be removed before dual-Doppler analysis can be performed. There are a total of 8 parameters involved in computing the platform motion and this is not a trivil problem. Testud et al. (1995) proposed a procedure to identify the error sources among these 8 parameters. However, they did not address several important issues, such as how to determine the tilt angle corrections and determine the platform velocity corrections over a moving surface. Unfortunately, the accuracy of the dual-Doppler analysis depends strongly on fully removal of the platform velocity.

The purpose of this paper is to present an improved Testud et al. (1995) procedure to obtain better corrections on tilt angles and platform velocity. Examples from VORTEX and FASTEX data will be presented in the conference.