Phased Array Weather Radar Architectures for Doppler Estimation With Space-Time Processing

Polarimetric weather radars, such as the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D), improve weather forecasts and provide valuable data for operational and scientific applications. The polarimetric capability adds additional insight into storm microphysics and greatly improves precipitation estimates. Nevertheless, fast-evolving weather events require high-temporal resolution data, which conventional radar systems (mechanical and dish-based) cannot provide. Phased array radar (PAR) offers superior observation capabilities with electronic beam steering and enhanced scanning agility. Furthermore, digital PAR enables 1-D (space and time) processing and overcomes limitations in clutter mitigation compared with the traditional radar systems that only use Doppler processing. Doppler processing is traditionally used to effectively filtering out ground clutter with zero mean velocity. In contrast, space-time processing (STP) enhances clutter mitigation to filter out both stationary and moving clutter through the joint spatial and temporal spectrum. This study aims to apply STP (nonadaptive) and space-time adaptive processing (STAP) to weather radar data and explore their benefits to improve Doppler velocity estimation of meteorological returns. Furthermore, the performance of STP and STAP for different digital PAR back ends, including fully digital and subarray systems, is investigated. Preliminary findings underscore the critical role of radar scanning parameters and environmental conditions, such as sample quantity, clutter-to-signal ratio (CSR), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), in the Doppler velocity estimation. Data collected with the recently completed Horus radar system are evaluated using STP and STAP. Results demonstrate the potential for improving data quality, particularly in Doppler velocity estimation within cluttered environments, through the application of STP and STAP techniques. The filtering algorithm with STAP demonstrates a substantial reduction in error within the Doppler velocity estimation, achieving approximately an eightfold improvement compared with the estimation derived from STP with filtering.