Range obscuration mitigation by adaptive PRF selection for the TDWR System
Summary
The Federal Aviation Administration has recently awarded a contract for the procurement of 47 Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) systems to be sited near high traffic airports. These systems will collect and process Doppler radar data that will be used by fully automated algorithms to identify hazardous meteorological wind shear events in real time (eg., microbursts and gust fronts.) This information will the be conveyed to aircraft pilots in order that potentially hazardous takeoffs or landings be averted. In a pulsed Doppler weather radar, one of the most serious causes of data quality degradation is due to range aliased echoes from distant storms [3]. This range contamination can occur in the immediate vicinity of a meteorological hazard, possibly obscure the event, and thus decrease the probability of detecting it. In other instances, range contaminated data can present a radar signature similar to that of a wind shear hazard, and perhaps cause an algorithm to issue a false alarm. In order for the TDWR system to achieve a high probability of detecting meteorological hazards, while maintaining a low probability of false alarms, an effective means of dealing with range contamination is required. An adaptive procedure by which to select the radar's pulse repetition frequency (Pm) has been developed as a primary means by which to minimize range contamination within the operationally significant coverage area of a TDWR system. This procedure will be developed within this paper and a quantitative assessment as to the anticipated effectiveness of this technique in the TDWR system will be provided.