Adaptive Sparse Domain Selection for Weather Radar Superresolution

Abstract

Accurate and high-resolution weather radar data reflecting detailed structure information of radar echo plays an important role in analysis and forecast of extreme weather. Typically, this is done using interpolation schemes, which only use several neighboring data values for computational approximation to get the estimated, resulting the loss of intense echo information. Focus on this limitation, a superresolution reconstruction algorithm of weather radar data based on adaptive sparse domain selection (ASDS) is proposed in this article. First, the ASDS algorithm gets a compact dictionary by learning the precollected data of model weather radar echo patches. Second, the most relevant subdictionaries are adaptively select for each low-resolution echo patches during the spare coding. Third, two adaptive regularization terms are introduced to further improve the reconstruction effect of the edge and intense echo information of the radar echo. Experimental results show that the ASDS algorithm substantially outperforms interpolation methods for ×2 and ×4 reconstruction in terms of both visual quality and quantitative evaluation metrics.