Adaptive Radar Approaches for Doppler Moment Estimation

Abstract

To characterize atmospheric turbulence, the Doppler moments are estimated by weather radars. However, moment accuracy is highly sensitive to radar transmission parameters such as the pulse repetition time ( ${T}_{s}$ ) and the number of pulses ( ${N}_{p}$ ), which affects Doppler ambiguity and estimation variance. Traditional fixed-parameter radars face tradeoffs between aliasing and measurement precision. This letter proposes an adaptive radar framework that dynamically adjusts ${T}_{s}$ and ${N}_{p}$ on a per-scan basis to improve Doppler moment estimation at a single resolution cell level. Inspired by the fully adaptive radar (FAR) concept, the method also includes a novel multilag Doppler width estimation scheme. Results demonstrate enhanced estimation accuracy, enabling better responsiveness to localized and nonstationary weather conditions.