Comparison of wind estimation errors for the spaced antenna technique: A case study for the MU radar

Abstract

[1] In this paper we estimate the random errors in the spaced antenna (SA) winds by two techniques and compare them with measurements made by the Doppler technique. With a one spatial dimension computer simulation, we apply typical parameters for the middle and upper atmosphere (MU) radar without noise. Briggs ' [1984] full correlation analysis (FCA) is commonly applied to the SA technique, while Doviak et al. [1996] and Holloway et al. [1997] used another simple analytic form based on scattering theory to derive generalized expressions. This simple analytic form should have equivalent results to the Briggs FCA for the horizontal wind estimation. With our simulation results, this form generally shows similar results to the FCA, and sometimes shows better performance than the FCA although it needs simpler calculation than the FCA. The estimation error of this simple analytic form is better than that of the Doppler for large wind, and better than that of the FCA for small antenna spacing. MU radar observations are compared with these two analyses for the SA technique, and the simple analytic form also shows similar performance to the FCA.

The Buckland Park MF radar: routine observation scheme and velocity comparisons

“…FCA measurement errors have been shown to increase with decreasing beamwidths (e.g. Røyrvik, 1983;Kawano et al, 2002), as the resulting increase in the ground diffraction pattern scale increases the errors in the correlation parameters used in the analysis. However, the measurement errors in the correlation parameters decrease with increasing SNR.…”

Comparison of spaced‐antenna baseline wind estimators: Theoretical and simulated results

“… May [1988] is the first to derive formulas to calculate precision when winds are estimated using the full correlation analysis (FCA) of Briggs [1984]. More recently, Tahara et al [1997] and Kawano et al [2002] have used simulations to determine the performance of SA and DBS wind profilers. In this paper we derive theoretical formulas to determine the precision of cross‐beam winds calculated from SA data.…”

“…For each wind measurement method and implementation, these formulas are used to evaluate, as an example, the theoretical performance of MAPR, NCAR's 915 MHz, Multiple Antenna Profiling Radar. The theory is also compared with the standard error obtained from simulations presented by Kawano et al [2002] for the MU radar in Shigaraki, Japan. Comparisons show that the Intersection and Briggs' FCA methods are identical and provide the best performance.…”

Variance of wind estimates using spaced antenna techniques with the MU radar

“…However, simplifications are often made to the case of isotropic scattering, and furthermore, analyses of parameter estimate variance have been largely limited to simulations and analytical considerations of alongbaseline wind components (Tahara and Yamamoto, 1997;Kawano et al, 2002;Zhang et al, 2003).…”

“…Results of our equations are compared to simulated results published by Kawano et al (2002), and the differences are discussed. Finally we present data from the MU radar.…”