Theory and Characterization of Weather Radar Networks

A dense weather radar network is an emerging concept advanced by the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA). In a weather radar environment, the specific radar units employed and the network topology will influence the characteristics of the data obtained. To define this, a general framework is developed to describe the radar network space, and formulations are obtained that can be used for weather radar network characterization. The models developed are useful for quantifying and comparing the performance of different weather radar networks. Starting with system characteristics that are used to specify individual radars, a theoretical basis is developed to extend the concept to network configurations of interest. A general network elemental cell is defined and employed as the parameterized domain over which different coverage aspects (such as detection sensitivity, beam size, and minimum beam height) are studied using analytical tools developed in the paper. Other important parameters are the number of different radars with overlapping coverage at a given point in the network domain and the coverage area and number of radars of a network and its elemental cells. A combination of analytical and numerically derived expressions is employed to obtain these parameters for several configurations. The radar network characterization tools developed are applied to the comparison of individual radar and networked radar configurations of interest. The values used in the calculations illustrate the CASA Integrated Project 1 (IP1) radar network and are compared to other radar systems.