Analysis of Atmospheric Conditions Using Long-Range Surveillance Radar

Abstract

The refraction phenomenon of radio waves should be considered to improve the detection accuracy of target altitudes for long-range surveillance radars, however, it is difficult to estimate accurate refractivity of atmosphere for every location. In this paper, we propose the atmosphere evaluation metric(AEM) to estimate atmospheric conditions at target locations using target altitudes obtained from primary surveillance radar(PSR) and secondary surveillance radar(SSR). To verify the suitability of the proposed metric, we observed atmospheric conditions and calculated estimation errors of target altitudes using measured data.