Experimental determination of mean Doppler‐reflectivity relationship with a vertically pointing Doppler radar

A pseudo noise coded continuous wave Doppler radar, operated at a frequency of 35 GHz, was used to measure drop‐size distributions and the mean Doppler for vertical velocitiesv ¯ . The data have been used to determine a relationship between,v ¯and the radar reflectivity factor, Z. 95% of thev ¯experimental data fall within ±0.3 m sec −1 of thev ¯functionv ¯= 2.67 Z 0.095 ( v ¯m sec −1 ). The spread of the data may be attributed to a small contribution of unknown vertical air velocity in the low altitude (15 m to 25 m) scattering region.