Robust estimation of mean Doppler frequency for the measurement of average wind velocity in a weather radar

Abstract

In a Doppler weather radar, high resolution windspeed profile measurements are needed to provide reliable detection of a hazardous weather condition. For this purpose, the pulse pair method is generally considered to be the most efficient estimator. However, this estimator has some bias errors due to nonsymmetric spectra and may yield meaningless results in the case of a multimodal return spectrum. The bias errors were analyzed and an improved method was suggested to reduce these errors. For the case of a multimodal or seriously skewed spectrum, the modes of the spectrum may provide more reliable information than the statistical mean. Therefore, the idea of a relatively simple mode estimator is also developed.<>