Weather radar: Operation and phenomenology

Radar is an indispensable technology in areas of defense, air traffic control (ATC), and weather surveillance. The usual goal of defense and air traffic control radars is to detect and track individual targets; in contrast, the "target" of weather radars may stretch hundreds of kilometers. The meteorology, defense, and ATC communities typically publish research in different venues, and each community has a vernacular and characteristic ways of approaching problems. The goals of this article are twofold. Its primary goal is to summarize typical weather radar systems and define associated jargon in terms more familiar to other radar communities. The second goal is to provide a detailed discussion of the physical scattering phenomenology exploited specifically in radar meteorology. Furthermore, while there are a number of operational weather radars, we focus throughout much of this article on the most common weather radar, Weather Surveillance Radar 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D), as a canonical example, because much of the current research and phenomenological analysis are based on its operational parameters.