Spectral processing of SEAPOL weather radar observations

In this paper, a spectral domain signal processing technique is demonstrated to filter out sea clutter from data of ship-borne weather radar. A procedure is shown for correcting the velocity errors in the spectrographs that is due to ship’s motion during radar scanning. A novel thresholding criterion named as spectral signal quality index (SSQI) is developed to suppress noise and unwanted interference in the spectral domain processing. It is shown that the application of SSQI based thresholding leads to a better discrimination of weather signals against noise and sea clutter. This technique is demonstrated using data from SEAPOL a C-band shipborne dual polarimetric weather radar to effectively remove sea clutter.