Improved Performance in Horizontal Wind Estimation Using a Spaced Antenna Drift Technique and Signal Processing Approaches

The middle and upper atmospheric (MU) radar at Shigaraki, Japan, is an excellent system to carry out observation using a spaced antenna (SA) technique. Over several years, numerous scientific studies were reported using SAs. In most of the studies, a SA is used to derive wind information, and the array is divided in to three segments and is grouped with three or six channels to obtain the baselines in the form of an equilateral triangle. In previous work, the wind had been estimated by the SA up to a maximum height of 10-14 km. In general, a SA-based wind estimation could not give good height coverage due to a smaller aperture being used for received signals. In this paper, the observation has been conducted for full-array transmission and reception of signal with 25 receiver channels of the profiler. The receiver channels are divided into three equal segments to form the baselines suitable for deriving horizontal wind vector components using full correlation analysis (FCA). FCA is considered as a conventional SA technique. The identification of receive channels for grouping and its phase centers was critical to obtain the good correlation value and to determine the velocity. The grouping is repeated with four different orientations of the array group. In each case, the wind velocity is estimated. The horizontal wind vector components obtained from all orientations are averaged to obtain mean horizontal wind vector components. The results are compared with the wind velocity estimated using a Doppler beam swinging (DBS) technique and that observed by the GPS sonde. It is observed that the new approach adopted using spatially distributed array grouping has yielded higher height coverage up to 20 km and in good agreement with the results obtained using DBS and GPS-sonde observations with a temporal resolution of 1.3 min in clear air condition.