Design and Application of Dual-polarization Weather Radar Signal Simulator

Dual polarization weather radar is one of the most widely used and effective tools for monitoring and early warning of catastrophic weather. The performance of weather radar needs to be tested during both the development and utilization stages to ensure the refinement and accuracy of meteorological operations. The actual measurement requires a long period of observation tests, data collection, and data analysis. The weather radar echo signal simulator designed in this study can use existing weather data to simulate the weather radar received signals and inject them into weather radar to achieve a flexible combination of experiments. The simulator can effectively save the cost of research and development, testing, and maintenance. When designing new radar or signal processing algorithms, it can quickly obtain the performance indexes in practical applications without relying on actual measurements. According to the weather process, radar system parameters, working mode, and processing algorithms, the simulator can modulate the echo containing weather information into the signal generated by the radar after transmitting the signal, and at the same time receive the servo control signal, and according to the antenna position select the matching echo signal to inject into the radar. Meanwhile, the simulator can collect weather radar echo signals, and store IF or zero-IF weather echo signals, measure different weather radars by generating weather echo signals through the forwarding mode, and obtain the measurement results of different radars or different signal processing algorithms.