An Examination of Wind Profiler Signal Processing Algorithms

Abstract

A numerical model to simulate radar data is used for testing various estimators of the Doppler shift in Doppler radar echoes. The estimators are the pulse pair and poly-pulse pair algorithms in the correlation domain, a least-squares fitting to the spectral peak of the power spectra, and direct calculations of the moments from periodograms in the spectral domain. Two averaging schemes (a consensus average and a median filter) are also examined for data with poor signal-to-noise ratios. The data processing method used in Doppler radar wind profilers, which operate over a very wide range of signal to noise ratios, is examined in detail. It is shown that the direct moment calculation combined with a consensus averaging technique has the best overall performance for accuracy and the ability to use data with a very low signal-to-noise ratio.