Adaptive Range Oversampling to Improve Estimates of Polarimetric Variables on Weather Radars

Abstract

Abstract One way to reduce the variance of meteorological-variable estimates on weather radars without increasing dwell times is by using range oversampling techniques. Such techniques could significantly improve the estimation of polarimetric variables, which typically require longer dwell times to achieve the desired data quality compared to the single-polarization spectral moments. In this paper, an efficient implementation of adaptive pseudowhitening that was developed for single-polarization radars is extended for dual polarization. Adaptive pseudowhitening maintains the performance of pure whitening at high signal-to-noise ratios and equals or outperforms the digital matched filter at low signal-to-noise ratios. This approach results in improvements for polarimetric-variable estimates that are consistent with the improvements for spectral-moment estimates described in previous work. The performance of the proposed technique is quantified using simulations that show that the variance of polarimetric-variable estimates can be reduced without modifying the scanning strategies. The proposed technique is applied to real weather data to validate the expected improvements that can be realized operationally.