Precipitation Doppler Spectrum Reconstruction with Gaussian Process Prior

The challenge of reconstructing the Doppler spectrum of a precipitation-like event observed by a fast-scanning weather radar is addressed. A novel method is proposed where the echo sequence in time is assumed to be a complex Gaussian process with a known covariance structure. It is a two-step approach where the first step is the estimation of the hyper-parameters of the covariance function with a maximum likelihood approach, and the second step is the reconstruction of the spectrum directly in the time or spectral domain. The proposed approach is applied to simulated data for hyper-parameter estimation performance analysis and real radar data for the complete Doppler spectrum reconstruction.