Svetlana Bachmann

Spectral Density of Polarimetric Variables Separating Biological Scatterers in the VAD Display

Abstract Echoes in clear air from two types of biological scatterers mixed within the resolution volumes over a large region, observed with S-band dual polarization radar, are presented. This case occurred in the evening of 7 September 2004, at the beginning of the fall migrating season of song birds (passerines). Polarimetric spectral analyses are used for distinguishing birds and insects in multimodal spectra. Spatial continuity of spectral peaks shows clear separation of insect (wind) speeds from bird speeds. Spectral densities of polarimetric variables exhibit vastly different values at speeds corresponding to insects than from those of birds, allowing the separation of the two scatterer types. Therefore, the statistics of the intrinsic polarimetric variables computed from spectral densities are unbiased and closer to the ensemble statistics of the echo type than the ones obtained with standard processing techniques. A novel display of the spectral densities versus azimuth, termed spectral velocity–az...

Using the Existing Spectral Clutter Filter With the Nonuniformly Spaced Time Series Data in Weather Radar

The National Weather Service (NWS) has a network of weather surveillance Doppler radars, WSR-88D, that is routinely upgraded to reflect current technological and engineering advances. During the last decade, the staggered pulse repetition time (SPRT) was proposed to mitigate range/velocity ambiguity in WSR-88D; however, it could not be used at lowest elevation tilts due to the inability to filter ground clutter from the nonuniformly spaced time series. A complicated spectral procedure was developed to address this issue, but the procedure was derived for a specific set of data acquisition parameters and used a lookup table to provide a value for the clutter spectrum width. Attempts to use SPRT with different sets of acquisition parameters always led to the degradation of filtering. It is proposed here that the clutter spectrum width be estimated by using Gaussian model adaptive processing (GMAP) that is currently used by NWS for uniformly sampled time series. GMAP is an adaptive ground clutter filter that performs an iterative fit of a Gaussian curve to the spectral coefficients identified as being due to ground clutter. GMAP cannot be used directly with the SPRT spectrum because of multiple clutter replicas that are due to staggered nonuniform sampling. However, the elements of GMAP can be exploited and used in the SPRT procedure. This letter presents how the elements of GMAP can be used with the SPRT data to provide successful clutter filtering at lowest elevation tilts.

Detection of Small Aircraft with Doppler Weather Radar

We present a method that can be performed in parallel to reflectivity estimation in weather radar and that allows one to detect small aircraft. Though small aircraft and large birds might produce comparable reflectivity signals their spectral signatures are considerably different. A small aircraft with propellers can be recognized from its spectrum via modulations produced by Doppler shifts from rotating parts. Generally such a spectrum has an elevated spectral floor compared to the spectrum of a resolution volume without an airplane. The spectral floor level is used for detection. The method is demonstrated on a clear air case observed with Doppler weather radar on March 6, 2007 at elevation 0.5°.

Spectral Analysis of Polarimetric Weather Radar Data with Multiple Processes in a Resolution Volume

A new approach for the clear air velocity estimation in weather radar is presented. A combination of nonparametric with parametric spectral analysis allows us to identify and extract multiple processes caused by different scatterer types within a single radar resolution volume. An example of clear air observed using an S-band dual polarization radar is presented. Heretofore, migrating birds and wind-blown insects that are mixed within each resolution volume caused such data to be unusable for meteorological interpretation. In this paper, we construct power spectral densities of polarimetric variables. We use the polarimetric spectral densities to differentiate the scatterer types within the observed radar resolution volume. We demonstrate how our combination of non-parametric and parametric spectral analysis can be used to retrieve the true wind velocity in situations with severe contamination by biological scatterers.

Techniques for detecting and tracking airplanes using weather radar WSR-88D

For the first time, weather radar echoes from point scatterers (airplanes) in a non-stormy environment are investigated in the time and frequency domains and compared to model simulations to build a background for differentiating these echoes from weather signals and to develop procedures for data censoring.