Technical aspects of a new S-band atmospheric profiler

A Transportable Atmospheric RAdar, TARA, has been developed at the International Research Centre for Telecommunications-transmission and Radar, IRCTR. State of the art but commercially available technology has been integrated to build a sensitive, versatile research radar primarily intended for atmospheric research. The system is based on the FM-CW principle and is fully solid-state. This yields improved system lifetime in comparison to tube-based systems. The antennas are dual linearly polarized for polarimetric applications. Multiple beams at 15° offset in two orthogonal directions in combination with the Doppler capabilities of the system are used for measuring three-dimensional wind fields. In this paper attention is paid to the technical realization of the system and some measurements are shown using the Doppler and multi-beam capabilities.