Improved range-velocity ambiguity mitigation for the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar
October 4, 2004
Conference Paper
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11th Conf. on Aviation, Range and Aerospace Meteorology, 4-8 October 2004.
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Summary
The Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) radar data acquisition (RDA) subsystem is being replaced as part of a broader FAA program to improve the supportability of the system. An engineering prototype RDA has been developed with a scalable, open-systems hardware platform. With the dramatically increased computing power and more flexible transmitter control, modern signal processing algorithms can be implemented to improve the quality of the base data. Nation-wide, the most serious data quality challenge is range-velocity (RV) ambiguity. In a previous study (Cho et al., 2003) we showed that multiple pulse repetition interval (PRI) and constant-PRI phase-code processing have complementary strengths with respect to range-fold protection, and pro-posed an adaptive waveform and processing selection scheme on a radial-by-radial basis. Here we describe the scheme and give more details about the clutter filtering and velocity dealiasing algorithms to be used on the two types of signals.