Airborne Doppler radar observations of a convective storm.

Abstract

Airborne Doppler radar can collect data on target storms that are quite widely dispersed. However, the relatively long time required to sample an individual storm in detail, particularly with a single aircraft, and the amplification of the statistical uncertainty in the radial velocity estimates when Cartesian wind components are derived, suggests that errors in wind fields derived from airborne Doppler radar measurements would exceed those from a ground based radar network which was better located to observe the same storm. Error distributions for two analysis methods are given and discussed for various flight configurations. -from Authors