Development of Scan Strategy for Dual Doppler Retrieval in a Networked Radar System

The NSF engineering research center for Collaborative and Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere has developed a networked weather radar test-bed to monitor and respond to severe thunderstorms and severe wind. For acquisition of radar reflectivity and other scalar fields, each radar is an independent unit and only the radar range equation is of primary concern. However, with respect to the acquisition of wind velocity, pairs or triplets of radar need to be considered as units and the perspective observation angles are of primary concern, besides the constraint in range. Multiple candidate pairs exist for most of the test-bed coverage and choice has to be made in scan strategy. In addition, the whole network is required to update the observations within a finite time period. This further limits the number of sweeps depending on the sector width to be scanned. All these constraints are consolidated together in generating the scan strategy based on the best dual-Doppler pair. In this paper, the method to generate dual Doppler scan strategy is presented. The method is tested in field experiments for scan evaluation and the results are presented.