Accurate numerical modeling of the TARA reflector system

The Transportable Atmospheric RAdar system (TARA) project financed by the Netherlands Technology Foundation constitutes the design and construction of a mobile measurement facility incorporating the latest developments in antenna and FM-CW technology. The purpose of the measuring facility is the study of atmospheric phenomena such as clouds, precipitation and clear air turbulence. We present a multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) implementation with a new preconditioning scheme that allows to simulate the non-symmetrical TARA reflectors with half a million unknowns on a desktop computer.