A Method for Detecting Rainfall From X-Band Marine Radar Images

Currently, X-band marine radar images are commonly utilized to retrieve sea wave parameters. However, the marine radar image usually contains rainfall interference noise, which has an effect on the inversion accuracy of the wave parameters. To control the quality of the radar image when retrieving sea wave parameters, research on rainfall detection is investigated in this paper. Based on the correlation characteristics of the sea clutter and the difference in the correlation coefficients between sea wave images with and without rain, a novel method of rainfall detection is proposed. By analyzing the spatial and temporal correlation characteristics of sea clutter, the detection threshold of the proposed method is determined. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, X-band marine radar data collected at Pingtan, which is located on the coast of the East China Sea, are utilized in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively detect rainfall from X-band marine radar images.