Errors in the Determination of Wind Speed by Doppler Radar

Abstract

A numerical model to simulate radar data is used for testing various estimators of the Doppler shift in Doppler radar echoes. Five estimators for the Doppler shift are considered: the pulse pair and poly-pulse pair algorithms in the correlation domain, least squares fitting to the power spectra in linear and logarithmic coordinates, and a matched filter in the spectral domain. An experiment with real data, to test the algorithms further and to assess the importance of small-scale wind fluctuations on radar performance, shows that geophysical limitations on the accuracy of the wind estimates are the dominant factor for observations with good signal-to-noise ratio.