A radar antenna intercepts thermal radiation from various sources including the ground, the sun, the sky, precipitation, and man-made radiators. In the radar receiver, this external radiation produces noise that constructively adds to the receiver internal noise and results in the overall system noise. Consequently, the system noise power is dependent on the antenna position and needs to be estimated accurately. Inaccurate noise power measurements may lead to reduction of coverage if the noise power is overestimated or to radar data images cluttered by noise speckles if the noise power is underestimated. Moreover, when an erroneous noise power is used at low-to-moderate signal-to-noise ratios, estimators can produce biased meteorological variables. Therefore, to obtain the best quality of radar products, it is desirable to compute meteorological variables using the noise power measured at each antenna position. In this paper, an effective method is proposed to estimate the noise power in real time from measured powers at each radial. The technique uses a set of criteria to detect radar range resolution volumes that do not contain weather signals and uses those to estimate the noise power. The algorithm is evaluated using both simulated and real time series data; results show that the proposed technique accurately produces estimates of the system noise power. An operational implementation of this technique is expected to significantly improve the quality of weather radar products with a relatively small computational burden.

The recently installed S-band phased-array radar (PAR) at the National Weather Radar Testbed (NWRT) offers fast and flexible beam steering through electronic beam forming. This capability allows the implementation of a novel scanning strategy termed beam multiplexing (BMX), with the goal of providing fast updates of weather information with high statistical accuracy. For conventional weather radar the data acquisition time for a sector scan or a volume coverage pattern (VCP) can be reduced by increasing the antenna's rotation rate to the extent that the pedestal allows. However, statistical errors of the spectral moment estimates will increase due to the fewer samples that are available for the estimation. BMX is developed to exploit the idea of collecting independent samples and maximizing the usage of radar resources. An improvement factor is introduced to quantify the BMX performance, which is defined by the reduction in data acquisition time using BMX when the same data accuracy obtained by a conventional scanning strategy is maintained. It is shown theoretically that a fast update without compromising data quality can be achieved using BMX at small spectrum widths and a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Applications of BMX to weather observations are demonstrated using the PAR, and the results indicate that an average improvement factor of 2-4 can be obtained for SNR higher than 10 dB.

This paper describes a real-time implementation of adaptive range oversampling processing on the National Weather Radar Testbed phased-array radar. It is demonstrated that, compared to conventional matched-filter processing, range oversampling can be used to reduce scan update times by a factor of 2 while producing meteorological data with similar quality. Adaptive range oversampling uses moment-specific transformations to minimize the variance of meteorological variable estimates. An efficient algorithm is introduced that allows for seamless integration with other signal processing functions and reduces the computational burden. Through signal processing, a new dimension is added to the traditional trade-off triangle that includes the variance of estimates, spatial coverage, and update time. That is, by trading an increase in computational complexity, data with higher temporal resolution can be collected and the variance of estimates can be improved without affecting the spatial coverage.

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WSR-88D superresolution data are produced with finer range and azimuth sampling and improved azimuthal resolution as a result of a narrower effective antenna beamwidth. These characteristics afford improved detectability of weaker and more distant tornadoes by providing an enhancement of the tornadic vortex signature, which is characterized by a large low-level azimuthal Doppler velocity difference. The effective-beamwidth reduction in superresolution data is achieved by applying a tapered data window to the samples in the dwell time; thus, it comes at the expense of increased variances for all radar-variable estimates. One way to overcome this detrimental effect is through the use of range oversampling processing, which has the potential to reduce the variance of superresolution data to match that of legacy-resolution data without increasing the acquisition time. However, range-oversampling processing typically broadens the radar range weighting function and thus degrades the range resolution. In this work, simulated Doppler velocities for vortexlike fields are used to quantify the effects of range-oversampling processing on the velocity signature of tornadoes when using WSR-88D superresolution data. The analysis shows that the benefits of range-oversampling processing in terms of improved data quality should outweigh the relatively small degradation to the range resolution and thus contribute to the tornado warning decision process by improving forecaster confidence in the radar data.

As range-oversampling processing has become more practical for weather radars, implementation issues have become important to ensure the best possible performance. For example, all of the linear transformations that have been utilized for range-oversampling processing directly depend on the normalized range correlation matrix. Hence, accurately measuring the correlation in range time is essential to avoid reflectivity biases and to ensure the expected variance reduction. Although the range correlation should be relatively stable over time, hardware changes and drift due to changing environmental conditions can have measurable effects on the modified pulse. To reliably track changes in the range correlation, an automated real-time method is needed that does not interfere with normal data collection. A method is proposed that uses range-oversampled data from operational radar scans and that works with radar returns from both weather and ground clutter. In this paper, the method is described, tested using simulations, and validated with time series data.

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