A digital beamforming radar profiler for imaging turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer

Digital beamforming techniques with adaptive processing have been used for several decades in high performance radar systems to track targets in the presence of jamming. With the availability of inexpensive microwave and digital componentry, these techniques are now practical for non-military applications. The authors have recently developed a 915 MHz digital beamforming radar system, termed the Turbulent Eddy Profiler, designed to resolve atmospheric C/sub n//sup 2/ fluctuations over a three-dimensional volume containing several thousand pixels, with each pixel approximately 30 m on a side. These scales are comparable with large eddy simulations (LES) allowing a comparison of radar-derived structure statistics with those generated by LES.