Improving Wind Profiler–Measured Winds Using Coplanar Spectral Averaging

A method is presented that increases the detectability of weak clear-air signals by averaging Doppler spectra from coplanar wind profiler beams. The method, called coplanar spectral averaging (CSA), is applied to both simulated wind profiler spectra and to 1 yr of archived spectra from a UHF profiler at Christmas Island (1 October 1999–30 September 2000). A collocated 50-MHz wind profiler provides a truth for evaluating the CSA technique. In the absence of precipitation, it was found that CSA, when combined with a fuzzy logic quality control, increases the height coverage of the 1-hourly averaged UHF profiler winds by over 600 m (two range gates). CSA also increased the number of good wind estimates at each observation range by about 10%–25% over the standard consensus method.