Detection of Precipitation Using Scanning Radars with Strong Sectorial Interferences

The problem of precipitation detection using Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar under strong sectorial interference is addressed. The effect of such strong interferences in the case of an FMCW scanning radar is presented. Three signal-processing pipelines (two reflectivity-based and one Doppler-based) are proposed. The performances of all these pipelines are analyzed and compared. The morphology-based pipeline performs better for higher signal-to-noise ratios (> −15dB), whereas the entropy-based pipeline performs better in the case of lower SNRs (< −15dB). On the other hand, the circular variance-based masking technique is computationally very efficient. The proposed techniques are applied to simulated and real X-band fast-scanning radar data.