Doppler Profile Tracing Using MPCF on MU Radar and Sodar: Performance Analysis

Abstract

Wind profilers (WPs) are ground-based pulsed Doppler radars operating in the UHF/very high frequency (VHF) bands. They use backscatter from clear-air turbulence as a tracer of background wind in the troposphere and up to mesosphere. Wind profiling systems range from large research radar systems to smaller operational units. In recent times, multiparameter cost function (MPCF) has emerged as a computationally efficient Doppler profile estimation method. It has been claimed that the MPCF method can be easily migrated to any vertically sounding clear-air wind profiling system that works in Doppler beam swinging mode. In order to investigate this claim, MPCF was applied to the following wind profiling systems: the middle and upper atmosphere (MU) radar, located at Shigaraki, Japan, which is an active phased array VHF radar system with 475 transceivers, and Doppler sodar, located at Pune, India, which uses acoustic frequency to obtain echoes in the planetary boundary layer. Both these systems are complementary in the sense that they cover ranges from ground to about 80 km. During the experimentation, the MPCF algorithm did not need any change of parameters except the matching of the data reading formats. The results of MPCF on the MU radar were validated with Radiosonde data. These results indicate that the MPCF works seamlessly on all types of WP systems irrespective of the carrier, range, and radar type.