Reducing the Effect of Ground Clutter on Wind Profiler Velocity Measurements

Abstract

It is well known that the presence of ground clutter may severely bias radar measurements of the Doppler shift, particularly with wind profilers undertaking boundary layer measurements. It is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively with simulated data that a simple detrending of the time series data is often sufficient to significantly reduce the clutter problem. Finite impulse response filters are also investigated. Improvements are seen when long records are filtered prior to spectral analysis of the time series. The results are not very sensitive to the width of the filter (within reason) as long as the filter width encompasses the clutter spectrum.