Adaptive range oversampling to achieve faster scanning on the National Weather Radar Testbed phased-array radar

Abstract

This paper describes a real-time implementation of adaptive range oversampling processing on the National Weather Radar Testbed phased-array radar. It is demonstrated that, compared to conventional matched-filter processing, range oversampling can be used to reduce scan update times by a factor of 2 while producing meteorological data with similar quality. Adaptive range oversampling uses moment-specific transformations to minimize the variance of meteorological variable estimates. An efficient algorithm is introduced that allows for seamless integration with other signal processing functions and reduces the computational burden. Through signal processing, a new dimension is added to the traditional trade-off triangle that includes the variance of estimates, spatial coverage, and update time. That is, by trading an increase in computational complexity, data with higher temporal resolution can be collected and the variance of estimates can be improved without affecting the spatial coverage. © 2011 American Meteorological Society.