Spectral Signature Calculations for Remote Sensing

Abstract

Remote sensing radar has shown to be an important tool to observe severe and hazardous weather and to provide operational forecasters prompt information of such rapidly evolving phenomena. Although the history of tornado measurements is long, there have been only a few successes in obtaining spectral signatures. This is largely because neither the technology to process spectra nor the technology to record voluminous amounts of time series data were available, except for a few customized systems. However, present day radar technology and computer resources are now advanced enough to study tornado spectral signature in a systematic manner. The research WSR-88D (weather surveillance radar) locally operated by the National Severe Storm Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman has the unique capability of collecting massive volumes of Level I time series data over many hours which provides a rich environment for evaluating our new post-processing algorithms. In this work, an approach of identifying tornado vortices in Doppler spectra is proposed and investigated through the use of neural networks