Estimation of Doppler Spectrum Modes in a Weather Radar for Detection of Hazardous Weather Conditions

In a Doppler weather radar, high resolution windspeed profile measurements are needed to provide the reliable detection of hazardous weather conditions. For this purpose, the pulse pair method is generally considered to be the most efficient estimator, However, this estimator has some bias errors due to asymmetric spectra and may yield meaningless results in the case of a multimodal return spectrum. Although the poly-pulse pair method can reduce the bias errors of skewed weather spectra, the modes of spectrum may provide more reliable information than the statistical mean for the case of a multimodal or seriously skewed spectrum. Therefore, the idea of relatively simple mode estimator for a weather radar is developed in this paper, Performance simulations show promising results in the detection of hazardous weather conditions.