Application of Clutter Suppression Methods to a Geostationary Weather Radar Concept

Abstract

Abstract-While a geostationary weather radar would enable unprecedented monitoring of hurricanes and other severe weather, surface clutter could seriously limit its performance. The large incidence angles necessary for wide-area coverage, combined with the footprint size could cause surface clutter to obscure atmospheric return up to several km above the surface. The authors describe a Doppler filtering approach to clutter suppression and show simulation results. They find that Doppler filtering can significantly reduce the surface return, bringing surface clutter to acceptable levels. The authors then consider this approach when a staggered pulse repetition frequency is used to improve the maximum unambiguous velocity. They find that a method previously developed for ground-based weather radars can be successfully applied.

Evaluation of Surface Clutter for Future Geostationary Spaceborne Weather Radar

“…It is agreed that the GSWR would provide a breakthrough with regard to the observation of hurricanes or typhoons because the GSWR would be the first instrument capable of accomplishing hurricane observation at time scales less than hours [4]. However, one of the many problems in implementing GSWR is clutter from the surface, particularly at the large scan angles for good coverage from geostationary orbit [5]. The surface clutter is also a problem for tropical rainfall measuring mission precipitation radar (TRMM PR) [6][7][8][9][10] and global precipitation mission dual-frequency precipitation radar (GPM DPR) [11][12][13].…”

“…T Kubota [18] presents a statistical method to reduce sidelobe clutter for observed data of Ku-band radar in GPM PR. Durden and Tanelli [5] described a Doppler filter approach to clutter suppression for GWDR. However, the premise of these works is that they have firstly known how seriously the surface clutter will contaminate the rain echoes.…”

Geostationary Doppler Radar and Tropical Cyclone Surveillance

“…Our approach here is notional: we assume that velocity dealiasing has been carried out by a standard method (e.g., Gao and Droegemeier 2004), that a clutter suppression method, such as the one proposed by Durden and Tanelli (2009), has been applied, and that measurement uncertainties resulting from finite sampling are those identified by the nominal configuration. Our approach here is notional: we assume that velocity dealiasing has been carried out by a standard method (e.g., Gao and Droegemeier 2004), that a clutter suppression method, such as the one proposed by Durden and Tanelli (2009), has been applied, and that measurement uncertainties resulting from finite sampling are those identified by the nominal configuration.…”