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In this paper, we are concerned with microwave subsurface imaging achieved by inverting the linearized scattering operator arising from the Born approximation. In particular, we consider the important question of reducing the required data to achieve imaging. This can help to reduce the radar system's cost and complexity and mitigate the imaging algorithm's computational burden and the needed storage resources. To cope with these issues, in the framework of a multi-monostatic/multi-frequency configuration, we introduce a new spatial sampling scheme, named the warping method, that allows for a significant reduction in spatial measurements compared to other literature approaches. The basic idea is to introduce some variable transformations that "warp" the measurement space so that the reconstruction point-spread function obtained by adjoint inversion is recast as a Fourier-like transformation, which provides insights into how to achieve the sampling. In our previous contributions, we focused on presenting and checking the theoretical background with simple numerical examples. In this contribution, we briefly review the key components of the warping method and present its experimental validation by considering a realistic subsurface scattering scenario for the case of a buried water pipe. Essentially, we show that the latter succeeds in reducing the number of data compared to other approaches in the literature, without significantly affecting the reconstruction results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HF radar systems have the potential to measure the wind direction, in addition to surface currents and wave fields. However, studies on HF radar for wind direction determination are rare in the scientific literature. Starting with the results presented in Saviano et al. (2021), we here expand on the reliability of the multiannual wind direction data retrieved over two periods, from May 2008 to December 2010 and from January to December 2012, by a network of three SeaSonde high-frequency (HF) radars operating in the Gulf of Naples (Central Tyrrhenian Sea, Western Mediterranean Sea). This study focuses on the measurements obtained by each antenna over three range cells along a coast–offshore transect, pointing to any potential geographically dependent measurement. The scarcity of offshore wind measurements requires the use of model-generated data for comparative purposes. The data here used are obtained from the Mediterranean Wind–Wave Model, which provides indications for both wave and wind parameters, and the ERA5@2km wind dataset obtained by dynamically downscaling ERA5 reanalysis. These data are first compared with in situ data and subsequently with HF-retrieved wind direction measurements. The analysis of the overall performance of the HF radar network in the Gulf of Naples confirms that the HF radar wind data show the best agreement when the wind speed exceeds a 5 m/s threshold, ensuring a sufficiently energetic surface wave field to be measured. The results obtained in the study suggest the necessity of wind measurements in offshore areas to validate the HF radar wind measurements and to improve the extraction algorithms. The present work opens up further investigations on the applications of wind data from SeaSonde HF radars as potential monitoring platforms, both in coastal and offshore areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its maneuverability and agility, the shipborne high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) provides a new way of monitoring large-area marine dynamics and environment information. However, wind direction ambiguity is problematic when using monostatic shipborne HFSWR for wind direction inversion. In this article, an unambiguous wind direction measurement method based on wind direction interval limitation is proposed. The two first-order spectral wind direction estimation methods are first presented using the relationship between the normalized amplitude differences or ratios of the broadened Doppler spectrum and the wind direction. Moreover, based on the characteristic of a small wind direction estimation error in a large included angle between the spectral wind direction and the radar beam, the wind direction interval is obtained by counting the distribution of radar-measured wind direction within this included angle. Furthermore, the eliminated ambiguity of wind direction is transformed to judge the relationship between the wind direction interval and the two curves, which represent the relationship between the spreading parameter and the wind direction. Therefore, the remote sensing monitoring of ocean surface wind direction fields can be realized by shipborne HFSWR. The simulation results are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and the multi-beam sampling method for wind direction inversion. The experimental results show that the errors of wind direction estimated by the multi-beam sampling method and the equivalent dual-station model are large, and the proposed method can improve the accuracy of wind direction measurement. Three widely used wave directional spreading models have been applied for performance comparison. The wind direction field measured by the proposed method under a modified cosine model agrees well with that observed by the China-France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSAT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vortex electromagnetic (EM) waves, with different orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes, have the ability to distinguish the azimuth of radar targets, and then the two-dimensional reconstruction of the targets can be achieved. However, the vortex EM wave imaging methods in published research have no ability to obtain the elevation of the targets, and thus, the three-dimensional spatial structure and richer feature information of the radar target cannot be obtained. Therefore, a three-dimensional imaging method of vortex EM waves with integer- and fractional-order OAM modes is proposed in this paper, which can realize a three-dimensional reconstruction of a radar target based on a uniform circular array (UCA) with two-step imaging. First, the vortex EM wave with integer- and fractional-order OAM modes is generated, and the echo model with different OAM mode types is established. Thereafter, the echo with integer order is processed to obtain the range-azimuth image by fast Fourier transform (FFT). Then, in order to realize the three-dimensional reconstruction, the echo with fractional order is processed by utilizing the butterfly operation and analyzing the characteristics of the fractional Bessel function. Moreover, the resolution and reconstruction precision of the azimuth and elevation are analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ground static target detection, polarimetric high-resolution radar can distinguish the target from the strong ground clutter by reducing the clutter power in the range cell and providing additional polarimetric features. Since the energy of a target is split over several range cells, the resulting detection problem is called polarimetric range extended target (RET) detection, where all target scattering centers should be considered. In this paper, we propose a novel polarimetric RET detection method via adaptive range weighted feature extraction. Specifically, polarimetric features of range cells are extracted, and a pretrained attention-mechanism-based module is used to adaptively calculate range cells weights, which are used to accumulate the range cells features as detection statistics. While calculating weights, both amplitude and polarimetric features are considered. This method can make the most of polarization information and improve the accumulation effect, thus increasing the discrimination between targets and clutter. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified compared to both popular energy-domain detection methods and existing feature-domain detection methods, and the results show that our method exhibits superior detection performance. Moreover, we further analyze our method on different target models and different clutter distributions to prove that our method is suitable for different types of targets and clutter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a target tracking algorithm based on 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud information for autonomous driving applications, which addresses the limitations of traditional 2 + 1D radar systems by using higher resolution target point cloud information that enables more accurate motion state estimation and target contour information. The proposed algorithm includes several steps, starting with the estimation of the ego vehicle's velocity information using the radial velocity information of the millimeter-wave radar point cloud. Different clustering suggestions are then obtained using a density-based clustering method, and correlation regions of the targets are obtained based on these clustering suggestions. The binary Bayesian filtering method is then used to determine whether the targets are dynamic or static targets based on their distribution characteristics. For dynamic targets, Kalman filtering is used to estimate and update the state of the target using trajectory and velocity information, while for static targets, the rolling ball method is used to estimate and update the shape contour boundary of the target. Unassociated measurements are estimated for the contour and initialized for the trajectory, and unassociated trajectory targets are selectively retained and deleted. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using real data. Overall, the proposed target tracking algorithm based on 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud information has the potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of target tracking in autonomous driving applications, providing more comprehensive motion state and target contour information for better decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attacking a naval vessel with multiple missiles is an important way to improve the hit rate of missiles. Missile-borne radars need to complete detection and antijamming tasks to guide missiles, but communication between these radars is often difficult. In this paper, an optimization method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning is proposed for the collaborative detection and antijamming tasks of multiple radars against one naval vessel. We consider the collaborative radars as one player to make their confrontation with the naval vessel a two-person zero-sum game. With temporal constraints of the radar's and jammer's recognition and preparation interval, the game focuses on taking a favorable position at the end of the confrontation. It is assumed the total jamming capability of a shipborne jammer is constant and limited, and the shipborne jammer allocates the jamming capability in the radar's direction according to the radar threat assessment result and its probability of successful detection. The radars work collaboratively through prior centralized training and obtain a good performance by decentralized execution. The proposed method can make radars collaborate to detect the naval vessel, rather than only considering the detection result of each radar itself. Experimental results show that the proposed method in this paper is effective, improving the winning probability to 10% and 25% in the two-radar and four-radar scenarios, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We processed five years of measurements (2018–2022) of a vertically pointing radar MIRA 35c at the Milešovka meteorological observatory with the aim of analyzing the cloud structure of thunderstorms and comparing differences in measured data for cases when lightning discharges were observed very close to the radar position, and for cases when lightning discharges were observed at a greater distance from the radar position. The MIRA 35c radar is a Doppler polarimetric radar working at 35 GHz (Ka-band) with a vertical resolution of 28.9 m and a time resolution of approximately 2 s. For the analysis, we considered radar data whose radar reflectivity was at least 10 dBZ at 5 km or higher above the radar to ensure that there was a cloud above the radar. We divided the radar data into "near" data (a lightning discharge was registered up to 1 km from the radar position) and "far" data (a lightning discharge was registered from 7.5 to 10 km from the radar position). We compared the following quantities: (i) Power in co-channel (pow), (ii) power in cross-channel (pow-cx), (iii) phase in co-channel (pha), (iv) phase in cross-channel (pha-cx), (v) equivalent radar reflectivity (Ze), (vi) Linear Depolarization Ratio (LDR), (vii) co-polar correlation coefficient (RHO), (viii) Doppler radial velocity (V), (ix) Doppler spectrum width (RMS), and (x) Differential phase (Phi). Pow, pow-cx, pha, pha-cx, and V are basic data measured by the radar, while Ze, LDR, RHO, RMS, and Phi are derived quantities. Our results showed that the characteristics of the compared radar quantities are clearly distinct for "near" dataset from "far" dataset. Furthermore, we found out that there is a clear evolution close to the time of discharges of the observed radar quantities in the "near" dataset, which is not that obvious in the "far" dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of lava tubes beneath the surfaces of the Moon and Mars has been a popular research topic and challenge in planetary radar observation. In recent years, the Moon–based ground penetrating radar (GPR) carried by the Chinese Chang'e–3/–4 mission, the RIMFAX radar carried by the Mars mission Perseverance, and the RoSPR radar and MOSIR radar carried by China's Tianwen–1 orbiter have extensively promoted the exploration of the underground space of extraterrestrial bodies, which is crucial for the future utilization and development of these spaces. This paper expounds on the principles, methods, and detection results of using GPR to detect lava tubes on the Moon and Mars. First, lava tubes' formation mechanism and morphological characteristics are outlined, followed by an introduction to GPR's working principles and classification. The advantages, disadvantages, and prospects of different types of radar in detecting the lava tubes are analyzed. Finally, the distribution of lava tubes on the Moon and Mars is briefly summarized, and the potential utilization of lava tubes is discussed. We believe that the GPR technique is an effective geophysical method for exploring the underground structures of the Moon and Mars, and the lava tubes beneath the surface of extraterrestrial bodies can provide important references for selecting future Moon and Mars bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first advanced modular phase array incoherent scatter radar (ISR) established in the Eastern Hemisphere at low latitudes, Sanya ISR (SYISR) can measure the line-of-sight (LOS) velocity of ion drift in multiple directions, potentially yielding the spatial distribution of ionospheric plasma drift. Three beam-scanning modes are designed for plasma drift detection: meridian, zonal and cross-shaped (both meridian and zonal) plane, which will provide the distribution of plasma drift in latitude/longitude as well as altitude. The altitude profile of plasma drift and the first presented distribution of low latitude plasma drift in the meridian plane for March to May 2021 are inversed through LOS velocity using cross-shaped and meridian beam-scanning modes, respectively. A statistical correlation coefficient between the v p n and crest-to-trough ratio (CTR) of equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) TEC and a case study of magnetic storm response in plasma drift show that the inversed plasma drift can be a good indicator in response to the changes in atmospheric tide and solar wind at different time scales and explain the corresponding ionospheric electron density variations at low and equatorial latitudes. This study proves that the SYISR-measured plasma drift is reliable and will play an important role in the atmosphere-ionosphere-magnetospheric coupling study in the East Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-Doppler (m-D) analysis is the most effective mechanism for detecting rotating targets or components; however, it fails when the target rotation plane is perpendicular to the radar line of sight (LOS). The vortex electromagnetic wave (VEMW) provides a unconventional structure of wavefront phase modulation on the cross-plane of the radar LOS, on which the radial m-D vanishes while the rotational Doppler (RD) appears. In the absence of the position of rotation center, this paper focuses on the micromotion parameters estimation based on RD effect for rotating target, and then proposes an estimation procedure, referred to as the two-step method. The micromotion parameters of the rotating target include the rotation attitude, the rotation radius and the position of the rotation center while the latter is coupled to the former two. Firstly, the micromotion parameters are roughly estimated based on the RD curve parameters obtained from the time-frequency (TF) spectrum of the received signal. Secondly, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to accurately estimate the micromotion parameters. In addition, the Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) of parameter estimation is derived. The simulation studies the influencing factors of estimation performance and verifies that the proposed estimation method can provide excellent estimation accuracy of the micromotion parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed radar systems promise to significantly enhance target localization by virtue of the superiority of multi-view observations from widely separated radars, compared to their monostatic counterparts. Nevertheless, when the radar number is limited, performing target localization bears the brunt of the parameter identifiability requirement that the parameter number must be no less than the number of independent measurements. In this way, the canonical two-stage target localization method, as well as its developments, is no longer appropriate for direct application. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel target localization method using time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements with the minimum number of radars under platform position uncertainties. The referred distributed system is a bistatic multi-receiver system, where the primary signal is transmitted by a geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellite while receivers are equipped on several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In the first stage, the reference range from the reference radar to the target is estimated by a quadratic function, and then the weighted least squares (WLS) solution of the target location is updated by substituting the range estimate back into it. In the second stage, we invoke the Taylor series approximation to further refine the target localization obtained by the first stage. It can be foreseen that the developed method is beneficial for scenarios with a limited number of radars, including engineering projects such as fire control, surveillance, and guidance, to support high-accuracy target localization. The simulation results show the superiority of the localization performance of the proposed method over other existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is an important method of clutter suppression that requires adequate training samples. For an airborne conformal array radar, conventional STAP methods do not have enough training samples to acquire good performance due to the range dependent clutter caused by geometry and the problem of polarization. Sparse-recovery-based STAP (SR-STAP) methods have garnered significant attention in the past few decades because they only require a small number of training samples. Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) methods have seen increasing amounts of development due to its robust, self-regularizing nature and because it is not sensitive to user parameters, but it converges slowly. In this paper, a novel fast SBL (NFSBL) method is put forward to increase the rate of convergence. To minimize the SBL penalty function, the proposed method introduces the conjugate function to construct a surrogate function. Additional solution sparsity will be achieved through iteratively minimizing the surrogate function. Then, from the proposed method, we could obtain a more accurate clutter plus noise covariance matrix. Numerical simulation results express that this method could acquire better performance of STAP and improvement in convergence and computational complexity for a conformal array. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the design of waveforms for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems that can exploit multipath returns to enhance target detection performance. By making reasonable use of multipath information in the waveform design, MIMO radar can effectively improve the signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) of the receiver under a constant modulus (CM) constraint. However, optimizing the waveform design under these constraints is a challenging non-linear and non-convex problem that cannot be easily solved using traditional methods. To overcome this challenge, we proposed a novel waveform design method for MIMO radar in multipath scenarios based on deep learning. Specifically, we leveraged the powerful nonlinear fitting ability of neural networks to solve the non-convex optimization problem. First, we constructed a deep residual network and transform the CM constraint into a phase sequence optimization problem. Next, we used the constructed waveform optimization design problem as the loss function of the network. Finally, we used the adaptive moment estimation (Adam) optimizer to train the network. Simulation results demonstrated that our proposed method outperformed existing methods by achieving better SINR values for the receiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assimilating the proper amount of water vapor into a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model is essential in accurately forecasting a heavy rainfall. Radar data assimilation can effectively initialize the three-dimensional structure, intensity, and movement of precipitation fields to an NWP at a high resolution (±250 m). However, the in-cloud water vapor amount estimated from radar reflectivity is empirical and assumes that the air is saturated when the reflectivity exceeds a certain threshold. Previous studies show that this assumption tends to overpredict the rainfall intensity in the early hours of the prediction. The purpose of this study is to reduce the initial value error associated with the amount of water vapor in radar reflectivity by introducing advanced remote sensing data. The ongoing research shows that errors can be largely solved by assimilating satellite all-sky radiances and global positioning system radio occultation (GPSRO) refractivity to enhance the moisture analysis during the cycling period. The impacts of assimilating moisture variables from satellite all-sky radiances and GPSRO refractivity in addition to hydrometeor variables from radar reflectivity generate proper amounts of moisture and hydrometeors at all levels of the initial state. Additionally, the assimilation of satellite atmospheric motion vectors (AMVs) improves wind information and the atmospheric dynamics driving the moisture field which, in turn, increase the accuracy of the moisture convergence and fluxes at the core of the convection. As a result, the accuracy of the timing and intensity of a heavy rainfall prediction is improved, and the hourly and accumulated forecast errors are reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the current research areas in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing fields is deep learning-based ship detection in SAR imagery. Recently, ship detection in SAR images has achieved continuous breakthroughs in detection precision. However, determining how to strike a better balance between the precision and complexity of the algorithm is very meaningful for real-time object detection in real SAR application scenarios, and has attracted extensive attention from scholars. In this paper, a lightweight object detection framework for radar ship detection named multiple hybrid attentions ship detector (MHASD) with multiple hybrid attention mechanisms is proposed. It aims to reduce the complexity without loss of detection precision. First, considering that the ship features in SAR images are not inconspicuous compared with other images, a hybrid attention residual module (HARM) is developed in the deep-level layer to obtain features rapidly and effectively via the local channel attention and the parallel self-attentions. Meanwhile, it is also capable of ensuring high detection precision of the model. Second, an attention-based feature fusion scheme (AFFS) is proposed in the model neck to further heighten the features of the object. Meanwhile, AFFS constructs and develops a fresh hybrid attention feature fusion module (HAFFM) upon the local channel and spatial attentions to guarantee the applicability of the detection model. The Large-Scale SAR Ship Detection Dataset-v1.0 (LS-SSDD-v1.0) experimental results demonstrate that MHASD can balance detection speed and precision (improving average precision by 1.2% and achieving 13.7 GFLOPS). More importantly, extensive experiments on the SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) demonstrate that the proposed method is less affected by the background such as ports and rocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plasma lines observed by Sanya incoherent scatter radar (SYISR) are dependent on the enhancement of Langmuir waves due to superthermal photoelectrons generated by solar EUV radiation. The plasma line power spectrum can be obtained using long-pulse and alternating-code transmission signals during the period from sunrise to noon almost every day. For the power spectrum of the long pulse, the CLEAN algorithm that has been applied in this field is used to verify the feasibility of this method for SYISR in only a few cases. However, it is difficult to deal with alternating code with such a low SNR using the general deconvolution method. The irreversible-migration filtering (IMF) method has been developed to separate signal noise from the measurements of the alternating code. Some experimental results from the SYISR measurements validate the excellent performance of the IMF method for alternating code. Additionally, an example observation of the electron density with a high time and range resolution is derived. The results show that plasma line detection can be a powerful new observational capability for SYISR as an ionospheric experimental mode for ionospheric calibration, when possible, which can be simultaneously measured with the ion line for constant radar calibration in the standard fitting of the ion line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to improve the understanding of the microphysical characteristics of raindrop size distribution (DSD) under different rainfall rates (R) classes, and broaden the knowledge of the impact of radar wavelengths and R classes on the QPE of dual-polarization radars in the Tianshan Mountains, a typical arid area in China, we investigated the microphysical characteristics of DSD across R classes and dual-polarimetric radar QPE relationships across radar wavelengths and R classes, based on the DSD data from a PARSIVEL2 disdrometer at Zhaosu in the Tianshan Mountains during the summers of 2020 and 2021. As the R class increased, the DSD became wider and flatter. The mean value of the mass-weighted mean diameters (Dm) increased, while the mean value of logarithm normalized intercept parameters (log10 Nw) decreased after increasing from C1 to C3, as the R class increased. The largest contributions to R and the radar reflectivity factor from large raindrops (diameter > 3 mm) accounted for approximately 50% and 97%, respectively, while 84% of the total raindrops were small raindrops (diameter < 1 mm). Dual-polarization radars—horizontal polarization reflectivity (Zh), differential reflectivity (Zdr), and specific differential phase (Kdp)—were retrieved based on the DSD data using the T-matrix scattering method. The DSD-based polarimetric radar QPE relations of a single-parameter (R(Zh), R(Kdp)), and double-parameters (R(Zh,Zdr), R(Kdp,Zdr)) on the S-, C-, and X-bands were derived and evaluated. Overall, the performance of the R(Kdp) (R(Kdp,Zdr)) scheme was better than that of R(Zh) (R(Zh,Zdr)) for the QPE in the three bands. Furthermore, we have for the first time confirmed and quantified the performance differences in the QPE relationship of dual-polarization radars under different schemes, radar wavelengths, and R classes in typical arid areas of China. Therefore, selecting an appropriate dual-polarization radar band and QPE scheme for different R classes is necessary to improve the QPE ability compared with an independent scheme under all R classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection and quantification of fractures in rocks, as well as the detection of lithological changes, are of particular interest in scientific fields, such as construction materials, geotechnics, reservoirs and the diagnostics of dielectric composite materials and cultural heritage objects. Therefore, different methods and techniques have been developed and improved over the years to provide solutions, e.g., seismic, ground-penetrating radar and X-ray microtomography. However, there are always trade-offs, such as spatial resolution, investigated volume and rock penetration depth. At present, high-frequency radars (>60 GHz) are available on the market, which are compact in size and capable of imaging large areas in short periods of time. However, the few rock applications that have been carried out have not provided any information on whether these radars would be useful for detecting fractures and lithological changes in rocks. Therefore, in this work, we performed different experiments on construction and reservoir rocks using a frequency-modulated continuous wave radar working at 300 GHz to evaluate its viability in this type of application. The results showed that the radar quantified millimeter fractures at a 1 cm rock penetration depth with a sensitivity of 500 μm. Furthermore, lithological changes were identified, even when detecting interfaces generated by the artificial union of two samples from the same rock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the impact of assimilating radar radial velocity (RV) on the forecast of Super Typhoon Lekima (2019) using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and three-dimensional variational (3DVAR) assimilation system with different background error length scales. The results of two single observation tests show that the smaller background error length scale is able to constrain the spread of radar observation information within a relatively reasonable range compared with the larger length scale. During the five data assimilation cycles, the position and structure of the near-land typhoon are found to be significantly affected by the setting of the background error length scale. With a reduced length scale, the WRF-3DVAR system could effectively assimilate the radar RV to produce more accurate analyses, resulting in an enhanced typhoon vortex with a dynamic and thermal balance. In the forecast fields, the experiment with a smaller length scale not only reduces the averaged track error for the 24-h forecasts to less than 20 km, but it also more accurately captures the evolutions of the typhoon vortex and rainband during typhoon landing. In addition, the spatial distribution and intensity of heavy precipitation are corrected. For the 24-h quantitative precipitation forecasts, the equitable threat scores of the experiment with a reduced length scale are greater than 0.4 for the threshold from 1 to 100 mm and not less than 0.2 until the threshold increases to 240 mm. The enhanced prediction performances are probably due to the improved TC analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent release of European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) products implemented under the responsibility of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) guarantees free and accessible Europe-wide ground motion data for ground deformation analysis at the local and regional scales. The need for value-adding services and tools for optimal dissemination of radar data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite mission urges the scientific community to find efficient solutions. A desktop R-based application with a user-friendly interface capable of automatically downloading and transforming EGMS products delivered as large.csv tiles, equivalent to a radar burst into geospatial databases, is presented here. EGMStream is a self-contained desktop app that enables users to systematically store, customize, and convert ground movement data into geospatial databases, burst per burst or for an area of interest directly selectable on the app interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High frequency radar has a wide monitoring range and low range resolution. It may contain multiple targets or outlier interference phenomena in different clutter regions of the range–Doppler (RD) spectrum in detected background. The key to the performance of target detection in multi target backgrounds is the ability to determine the attributes of targets or outliers. Our previous research shows that the number of targets belongs to an absolute minority compared to the number of background units. In this paper, we propose a new method for multi-target detection building on the ordered statistics constant false alarm detector (OS-CFAR). The new method fully utilizes the sparse characteristics of the target and uses the idea of introducing regularization processing to eliminate interfering targets, and obtain an estimate of shape parameters for target detection. To further improve the performance of the algorithm, a correction method is proposed for the inaccurate selection of the k value. Upon estimating the distribution parameters, the detection threshold is calculated, and the target's constant false alarm detection is completed. Simulation and measured data show that our algorithm can effectively counter the interference of multiple targets and maintain a constant false alarm characteristic under different conditions, providing a reliable target detection method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enhanced Doppler resolution and sidelobe suppression have long been practical issues for moving target detection using Golay complementary waveforms. In this paper, Golay complementary waveform radar returns are combined with a proposed processor, the pointwise thresholding processor (PTP). Compared to the pointwise minimization processor (PMP) illustrated in a previous work, which could only achieve a Doppler resolution comparable to existing methods, this approach essentially increases the Doppler resolution to a very high level in theory. This study also introduced a further filtering process for the delay-Doppler map of the PTP, and simulations verified that the method results in a delay-Doppler map virtually free of range sidelobes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective target detection and tracking has always been a research hotspot in the field of radar, and multi-target tracking is the focus of radar target tracking at present. In order to effectively deal with the issue of outlier removal and track initiation determination in the process of multi-target tracking, this paper proposes an improved backward smoothing method based on label iterative processing. This method corrects the loophole in the original backward smoothing method, which can cause estimated target values to be erroneously removed due to missing detection, so that it correctly removes outliers in target tracking. In addition, the proposed method also combines label iterative processing with track initiation determination to effectively eliminate invalid target short-lived tracks. The results of simulation experiments and actual data verification showed that the proposed method correctly removed outliers and invalid short-lived tracks. Compared with the original method, it improved the accuracy of target cardinality estimation and tracking performance to a certain extent. Moreover, without affecting the algorithm performance, the method's processing efficiency could be improved by increasing the track pruning threshold. Finally, the proposed method was compared with existing methods, verifying that its tracking performance was better than that of existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millimeter-wave-based extended target tracking has attracted extensive interest recently because of its privacy, high precision, and low cost. This paper concentrated on crowded indoor situations and presents a novel method for group tracking. First, the proposed alpha-extended Kalman filter and the group association were carried out, which can constantly estimate the target expansion and the number of reflection points, consequently modifying the measurement noise and covariance estimation. Then, to initialize the actual targets, we employed a density-based spatial clustering approach that includes false target suppression. After the targets have been updated, the track re-association and estimation procedure is conducted to account for the unanticipated break of moving and near-static targets. Finally, various experiments involving fewer than 11 participants were designed to assess the robustness of the method. As a result, continuous and steady tracking results, as well as high counting accuracy were obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe results from coastal radar systems that observed anomalous current flows generated by the volcanic eruption in the Tongan archipelago on 15 January 2022 UTC, reporting the first radar detection of a volcanic tsunami. The eruption caused small tsunamis along the western U.S. Coast, generating some damage in a few harbors. The highest tsunami signal in U.S. tide gauge data from the California coast occurred at Arena Cove, with significant heights detected at Port San Luis and Crescent City. We analyze correlated wave orbital velocity detections by High Frequency (HF) radars along the coast between Gerstle Cove and Santa Barbara. Signals observed by the radars indicate that the event had two phases, each with its own distinct genesis: an initial weak surface disturbance, most likely generated by the wave of atmospheric pressure that moved outward from the blast source at just below the speed of sound, followed by a stronger disturbance that arrived approximately 3.5 h later, matching the arrival time for a wave moving entirely through the water from the volcano to the U.S. West Coast. We conclude that this phase consists of a conventional water wave tsunami and weaker waves generated by the pulse. We also report the detection of a small pulse-generated event off the west coast of Florida. Radar observations are compared with water level measurements at nearby tide gauges and a DART buoy, and with observations of barometric pressure. We point out that a Proudman near-resonance at the Tonga Trench is unlikely to explain the second phase observations. Comparison with tide gauge signals at San Francisco, generated by the Krakatoa eruption in 1883, support our conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The echoes collected by wideband radar systems provide abundant information on target scatterers, which is beneficial to target detection, classification, and recognition. However, as the radar range resolution increases, range cell migration (RCM) during the coherent integration (CI) period happens much easier, which may cause a degradation of target detection probability. In addition, due to the target's orientation and structure relative to the radar, the distribution characteristics of the target scatterers in high-resolution range profiles (HRRPs) and the detection window length may vary from pulse to pulse, which may reduce the performance of traditional energy integration (EI) detectors. To solve those problems, moving range-spread target (RST) detection combining the modified keystone transform (MKT) and improved EI (IEI) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, based on waveform entropy minimization, MKT using hunter–prey optimization (HPO) is introduced to reduce the CI gain loss. The target Doppler ambiguity factor is estimated using such an effective optimization technique. Then, the IEI detector optimized by the adaptive threshold and detection window is utilized to achieve target detection, which minimizes the sensitivity of the traditional EI detector to the detection window length. The proposed method significantly improves the performance of moving RSTs in sea clutter without prior knowledge of the target Doppler ambiguity factor. Experiments are conducted by comparing the proposed method with other competing methods on both simulation data and real sea clutter data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain the CI more efficiently and has a higher detection probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflected waves have been frequently observed via weather radar, even during sunny, cloudless days. Additionally, it is recognized that turbulence and biological scatterers can also dominate the scattering process. In previous studies, echo returns of turbulence from clear-air Bragg scattering (CABS) have been used to detect the height of the convective boundary layer (CBL). However, in a dual-frequency antenna multiplexing radar system, through which the dual-wavelength ratio (DWR) identifies the CABS clearly, CABS can be unexpectedly observed not only at the edge of the CBL but also above the CBL, highlighting the need for an expanded set of causes of clear-air echoes. It was further identified that the negative second derivative of horizontal wind speed, which is measured by a coherent Doppler Lidar, is consistent with the variation of the CABS layers' height above the CBL. These results emphasize the presence of physical processes leading to turbulence in the troposphere, with implications for Bragg scattering studies and the theory of turbulence in general. This study will help the ecology of research better understand the laws of biological activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of the ocean backscatter at various azimuth angles is critical to the radar detection of the ocean environment. In this study, the modified two-scale model (TSM), which introduces a correction term in the conventional TSM, is improved based on the empirical model, CMOD5.n. Then, the influences of different directional wave spectra on the prediction of azimuthal behavior of ocean radar backscatter are investigated by comparing the simulated results with CMOD5.n and the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) measurements. The results show that the overall performance of the single spectra of D, A, E, and H18 and the composite spectra of AH18 and AEH18 in predicting ocean backscatter are different at different wind speeds and incidence angles. Generally, the AH18 spectrum has better performance at low and moderate wind speeds, while the A spectrum works better at high wind speed. Nevertheless, the wave spectra have little effect on the prediction of the azimuthal fluctuation of scattering, which is highly dependent on the directional spreading function. The relative patterns of azimuthal undulation produced by different spreading functions are rather different at different wind speeds, but similar under different incidence angles. The Gaussian spreading function generally has better performance in predicting the azimuthal fluctuation of scattering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objects presented in synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) images are the products of the joint actions of ground objects and SAR sensors in specific geospatial contexts. With the accumulation of massive time-domain SAR data, scholars have the opportunity to better understand ground-object targets and sensor systems, providing some useful feedback for SAR-data processing. Aiming at normalized and low-cost SAR radiometric monitoring, this paper proposes a new hyper-pixel concept for handling multi-pixel ensembles of semantic ground targets. The special hyper-pixel in this study refers to low-rise single-family residential areas, and its radiation reference is highly stable in the time domain when the other dimensions are fixed. The stability of its radiometric data can reach the level of 0.3 dB (1 σ), as verified by the multi-temporal data from Sentinel-1. A comparison with tropical-rainforest data verified its availability for SAR radiometric monitoring, and possible radiation variations and radiation-intensity shifts in the Sentinel-1B SAR products ere experimentally monitored. In this paper, the effects of seasonal climate and of the relative geometrical states observed on the intensity of the hyper-pixel's radiation are investigated. This paper proposes a novel hyper-pixel concept for processing and interpreting SAR-image data. The proposed residential hyper-pixel is shown to be useful in multi-temporal-data observations for normalized radiometric monitoring and has the potential to be used for cross-calibration, in addition to other applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active radar calibrators (ARCs), also known as calibration transponders, are often used as reference targets for the absolute radiometric calibration of radar systems due to their large radar cross-sections (RCSs). Before such a transponder can be used as a reference target, the hardware itself has to be calibrated. A novel method, called the three-transponder method, was proposed some years ago to allow for RCS calibration of digital transponders without using any known RCS targets as reference. The first part of this paper refines the technique and presents the measurement setup as well as the results of a comprehensive measurement campaign performed to calibrate a single digital transponder. In this part of the paper, the results are validated and a comprehensive uncertainty analysis is performed to estimate the total RCS uncertainty associated with the presented measurement data. This uncertainty analysis follows the international standard "Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement" (GUM) and will derive expressions for all major sources of uncertainty. For the validation, the measurement results will be compared with full-wave electromagnetic simulations of trihedral corner reflectors; there is excellent agreement between the simulation and measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activity recognition plays a vital role in many applications, such as body falling surveillance and healthcare for elder's in-home monitoring. Instead of using traditional micro-Doppler signals based on time-frequency distribution, we turn to another way and use the Relax algorithm to process the radar echo so as to obtain the required parameters. In this paper, we aim at the multi-view idea in which two radars at different views work synchronously and fuse the features extracted from each radar, respectively. Furthermore, we discuss the common estimated time-frequency features and time-varying spatial features of multi-view radar-echo and then formulate the parameters matrix via principal component analysis, and finally transform them into the machine learning classifiers to make further comparisons. Simulations and results show that our proposed multi-view parameter fusion idea could lead to relative-high accuracy and robust recognition performance, which would provide a feasible application for future human–computer monitoring scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new sea surface wind direction from the X-band marine radar image is proposed in this study using a fast convergent gray-level co-occurrence matrix (FC-GLCM) algorithm. First, the radar image is sampled directly without the need for interpolation due to the algorithm's application of the GLCM to the polar co-ordinate system, which reduces the inaccuracy caused by image transformation. An additional process is then to merge the fast convergence method with the optimized GLCM so that the circular transition between rough and fine estimates is acquired, resulting in the fast convergence and accuracy improvement of the GLCM. Furthermore, the algorithm will affect the GLCM spatial distribution while calculating it, and it can automatically resolve the 180° ambiguity problem of sea surface wind direction retrieved from radar images. Finally, the proposed method is applied to 1436 X-band marine radar sequences collected from the coast of the East China Sea. Compared with in situ anemometer data, the correlation coefficient is as high as 0.9268, and the RMSE is 4.9867°. The new method was also tested under diverse sea conditions. The FC-GLCM wind direction results against the adaptive reduced method (ARM), energy spectrum method (ESM), and the traditional GLCM (T-GLCM) method produced the best stability and accuracy, in which the RMSE decreased by 91.6%, 67.7%, and 18.1%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aimingat non-side-looking airborne radar, we propose a novel unsupervised affinity propagation (AP) clustering radar detection algorithm to suppress clutter and detect targets. The proposed method first uses selected power points as well as space-time adaptive processing (STAP) weight vector, and designs matrix-transformation-based weighted input data, with which the first unsupervised weighted AP clustering is proposed by means of their similarity matrix, responsibility values and availability values. Then, new reconstructed weighted power inputs are designed, and the second weighted AP clustering is proposed. Finally, with their cluster results, a detection-discriminant criterion is designed for the judgment of target detection, and simultaneously, the clutter is suppressed. Compared with the conventional and important STAP, ADC and JDL algorithms, and several SO-based, GO-based and OS-based CFAR algorithms, the proposed unsupervised algorithm achieves much higher probability of detection and provides distinctly superior target-detection performance. With reasonable computation time, it can better conquer the range dependence in characteristic of clutter and better process non-independent identically distributed (non-IID) samples of non-side-looking radar. Sufficient simulations are performed, and they demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised algorithm is preferable and advantageous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a circularly polarized turnstile antenna for a meteor radar system. The antenna employs a pair of turnstile radiators, a 1:2 power divider and a 90° phase shifter. After a series of simulations and optimizations, the maximum circularly polarized gain at 39 MHz is 5.9 dBic with 96° 3 dB beam width. The simulated axial ratio below 3 dB is from −39° to 39° within the band of interest. Then, the proposed antenna is fabricated and applied to a meteor radar system. Two tests are carried out for radiation characteristics demonstration. In the first test, the VSWR of the proposed antenna is below 1.2 at 38.5–39.5 MHz and keeps good agreement with simulation results. However, the meteor azimuth distribution is illogical when the output results are compared with the Australian meteor detection radar (ATRAD) meteor detection. To address the problem, baluns are investigated and introduced for balanced feeding. The 1:1 unbalance–balance transformer has been used to improve the radiation characteristics of the designed antenna. The final test results show that the meteor radar system with the improved antenna achieves better performances in meteor counts and meteor azimuth distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many radar-gauge merging methods have been developed to produce improved rainfall data by leveraging the advantages of gauge and radar observations. Two popular merging methods, Regression Kriging and Bayesian Regression Kriging were utilized and compared in this study to produce hourly rainfall data from gauge networks and multi-source radar datasets. The authors collected, processed, and modeled the gauge and radar rainfall data (Stage IV, MRMS and RTMA radar data) of the two extreme storm events (i.e., Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019) occurring in the coastal area in Southeast Texas with devastating flooding. The analysis of the modeled data on consideration of statistical metrics, physical rationality, and computational expenses, implies that while both methods can effectively improve the radar rainfall data, the Regression Kriging model demonstrates its superior performance over that of the Bayesian Regression Kriging model since the latter is found to be prone to overfitting issues due to the clustered gauge distributions. Moreover, the spatial resolution of rainfall data is found to affect the merging results significantly, where the Bayesian Regression Kriging model works unskillfully when radar rainfall data with a coarser resolution is used. The study recommends the use of high-quality radar data with properly spatial-interpolated gauge data to improve the radar-gauge merging methods. The authors believe that the findings of the study are critical for assisting hazard mitigation and future design improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electron density measured at high latitudes by the Swarm satellites was compared with measurements by the incoherent scatter radars at Resolute Bay and Poker Flat. Overall, the ratio of Swarm-based electron density to that measured by the radars was about 0.5–0.6. Smaller ratios were observed at larger electron densities, usually during the daytime. At low electron densities less than 3 × 1010 m−3, the ratios were typically above 1, indicating an overestimation effect. The overestimation effect was stronger at night and for Swarm B. It was more evident at lower solar activity when the electron densities in the topside ionosphere were lower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing research proposes an intra-pulse frequency agile radar waveform with "active" anti-jamming characteristics. It uses the discontinuity and periodicity of the interrupted-sampling repeater jamming and combines the anti-jamming algorithm to effectively suppress interrupted-sampling repeater jamming. In order to improve the jamming effectiveness of the interferer for the intra-pulse frequency agile waveform, this paper proposes to jam the intra-pulse frequency agile radar by using a non-uniform interrupted-sampling and forwarding method under parameter constraints. The proposed method first obtains the sub-pulse width of the intra-pulse frequency agile radar waveform by parameter estimation of the intercepted intra-pulse frequency agile radar signal through time–frequency ridge extraction and wavelet transform. Then, we construct non-uniform interrupted-sampling repeater jamming based on sub-pulse width constraint interference parameters. Theoretical analysis and results show that the non-uniform interrupted-sampling forwarding under parameter constraints makes it challenging to suppress interference in multiple domains, such as the time–frequency and pulse compression domain for intra-pulse frequency agile radar, which significantly improves the jamming capability of the jammer for intra-pulse frequency agile radar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-Doppler signatures obtained from the Doppler radar are generally used for human activity classification. However, if the angle between the direction of motion and radar antenna broadside is greater than 60°, the micro-Doppler signatures generated by the radial motion of human body reduce significantly, thereby degrading the performance of the classification algorithm. For the accurate classification of different human activities irrespective of trajectory, we propose a new algorithm based on dual micro-motion signatures, namely, the micro-Doppler and interferometric micro-motion signatures, using an interferometric radar. First, the motion of different parts of the human body is simulated using motion capture (MOCAP) data, which is further utilized for radar echo signal generation. Second, time-varying Doppler and interferometric spectrograms obtained from time-frequency analysis of a single Doppler receiver and interferometric output data, respectively, are fed as input to the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for feature extraction and the training/testing process. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed and compared with a micro-Doppler signatures-based classifier. Results show that a dual micro-motion-based DCNN classifier using an interferometric radar is capable of classifying different human activities with an accuracy level of 98%, where Doppler signatures diminish considerably, providing insufficient information for classification. Verification of the proposed classification algorithm based on dual micro-motion signatures is also performed using a real radar test dataset of different human walking patterns, and a classification accuracy level of approximately 90% is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atmospheric delay is the primary error in ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GBSAR). The existing compensation methods include the external meteorological data correction method, the polynomial fitting method, and the persistent scatterers SAR interferometry (PSInSAR) calibration method. Combining the polynomial fitting and the persistent scatterers targets is the most popular method of GBSAR atmospheric delay compensation. However, the displacement component of the coherent target is always ignored in the atmospheric delay compensation, which is unpractical. A joint estimation method of ground displacement and atmospheric model parameters is developed in this paper. The displacement component is determined by the spatial and temporal features of the objects. The atmospheric delay component is regarded as a systematic error represented by a quadratic polynomial related to distance. The result is resolved by the least-square method. Compared to the existing method, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the proposed method had a significant improvement in the validation experiment. In the real in situ experiment, the time series obtained by the GBSAR had a similar trend to that acquired by the Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. It is indicated that the proposed method can lead to a better deformation estimation by taking the deformation component into account in the atmospheric compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar emitter identification (REI) aims to extract the fingerprint of an emitter and determine the individual to which it belongs. Although many methods have used deep neural networks (DNNs) for an end-to-end REI, most of them only focus on a single view of signals, such as spectrogram, bi-spectrum, signal waveforms, and so on. When the electromagnetic environment varies, the performance of DNN will be significantly degraded. In this paper, a multi-view adaptive fusion network (MAFN) is proposed by simultaneously exploring the signal waveform and ambiguity function (AF). First, the original waveform and ambiguity function of the radar signals are used separately for feature extraction. Then, a multi-scale feature-level fusion module is constructed for the fusion of multi-view features from waveforms and AF, via the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) structure. Next, the class probability is modeled as Dirichlet distribution to perform adaptive decision-level fusion via evidence theory. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets, and the results show that the proposed MAFN can achieve accurate classification of radar emitters and is more robust than its counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basal melt in the Dome A region will influence the deep-ice-core drilling at Kunlun Station. The melting point (wet bedrock) has a higher reflectivity than the surrounding area, which can be assessed using radar echoes from the bedrock. This paper uses a linear absorption model to determine wet and dry ice–bedrock interfaces around the Kunlun drilling site. In the determination process, an artificial intelligence model was applied to extract the ice–bedrock interface for inferring the ice thickness. Additionally, the various depth-averaged attenuation rates were used to identify the maximal range of basal melting. We mapped the patterns of the wet points on the bottom of the ice sheet and the modeled basal temperature to verify the results of the wet bed conditions. According to these maps of wet bed conditions, the areas with basal melting around the drilling site primarily appear in valley walls with low basal temperatures and are linked with hydraulic potential and bedrock elevation. Identifying the ice–bedrock interface is challenging in the valley bottom area, where the melting points are less than at the valley walls. Additionally, the melting proportions of 11.8% and 3.62% were calculated from two ice-penetrating radar data in this research. The mapped melting points around the site of Kunlun ice core drilling suggest complex ice flow effects and can be used to better interpret archives of old ice for paleoclimate research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, marine plastic pollution has seen increased coverage in the public interest and research due to a greater understanding of the scale and impact of plastic pollution within the marine environment. Considering the hazard that plastic waste poses on the environment, marine life, and on humans, remote-sensing techniques could provide timely information on their detection and dynamics. The remote sensing of marine plastic is a relatively new field and research into the capabilities of radar for detecting and monitoring marine plastic pollution is generally limited, with several interactions and mechanisms being largely unknown. Here, we exploit the use of a C- and X-band radar to understand the capabilities of monitoring marine plastics. Our results show that backscattering differences in the C- and X-band between the reference water (called here as "clean") and the test water filled with plastic can be detected in some conditions (based on statistical analysis). Overall, the results indicate that the X-band frequency performs significantly better than the C-band frequency, with X-band detecting significant differences in backscattering in 48/68 test cases compared with C-band detecting differences in 20/67 test cases. We also find that the difference in backscattering is dependent on the size and shape of the plastic object, as well as the wave conditions which the plastic is moving on. This study provides new insights on the radar capabilities for detecting marine plastic litter and new information which can be used in the planning of future missions and studies on the remote sensing of marine plastic pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data-driven machine learning technology can learn and extract features, a factor which is well recognized to be powerful in the warning and prediction of severe weather. With the large-scale deployment of the radar wind profile (RWP) observational network in China, dynamical variables with higher temporal and spatial resolution in the vertical become strong supports for machine-learning-based severe convection prediction. Based on the RWP mesonet that has been deployed in Beijing, this study uses the measurements from four triangles composed of six RWP stations to determine the profiles of divergence, vorticity, and vertical velocity before rainfall onsets. These dynamic feature variables, combined with cloud properties from Himawari-8 and ERA-5 reanalysis, serve as key input parameters for two rainfall forecast models based on the random forest (RF) classification algorithm. One is for the rainfall/non-rainfall forecast and another for the rainfall grade forecast. The roles of dynamic features such as divergence, vorticity, and vertical velocity are examined from ERA-5 reanalysis data and RWP measurements. The contribution of each feature variable to the performance of the RF model in independent tests is also discussed here. The results show that the usage of RWP observational data as the RF model input tends to result in better performance in rainfall/non-rainfall forecast 30 min in advance of rainfall onset than using the ERA-5 data as inputs. For the rainfall grade forecast, the divergence and vorticity that were estimated from the RWP measurements at 800 hPa show importance in improving the model performance in heavy and moderate rain forecasts. This indicates that the atmospheric dynamic variable measurements from RWP have great potential to improve the prediction skill of convection with the aid of a machine learning model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precipitation nowcasting has long been a challenging problem in meteorology. While recent studies have introduced deep neural networks into this area and achieved promising results, these models still struggle with the rapid evolution of rainfall and extremely imbalanced data distribution, resulting in poor forecasting performance for convective scenarios. In this article, we evaluate the amount of information in different precipitation nowcasting tasks of varying lengths using mutual information. We propose two strategies: the mutual information-based reweighting strategy (MIR) and a mutual information-based training strategy (time superimposing strategy (TSS)). MIR reinforces neural network models to improve the forecasting accuracy for convective scenarios while maintaining prediction performance for rainless scenarios and overall nowcasting image quality. The TSS strategy enhances the model's forecasting performance by adopting a curriculum learning-like method. Although the proposed strategies are simple, the experimental results show that they are effective and can be applied to various state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airborne scatterometer capability depends on not only the device's technical characteristics but also the scheme used for surface observations. Typically, a rotating-beam scatterometer uses a circular scheme for sampling normalized radar cross-sections (NRCS) at wind measurements over the sea. Here, we investigate wind retrieval using an updated semicircular scheme, providing the NRCS sampling at various combinations of incidence angles within the range 30° to 60°. The effectiveness of the wind retrieval using our semicircular sampling scheme was evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations, and we then developed corresponding wind algorithms that used a geophysical model function (GMF). As a result of the study, we found that a semicircular sampling scheme is well suited for wind retrieval over the sea using a rotating-beam scatterometer. We showed that a semicircular scheme can provide wind retrieval accuracies similar to those achievable with a conventional circular scheme, although the semicircular scheme requires approximately three times the number of NRCS samples integrated in each azimuth sector. Most importantly, however, the semicircular scheme enabled a maximum altitude for wind retrieval of twice the height possible with a circular scheme. In this study, we also demonstrate that the wind speed accuracy tends to increase with an increase in the incidence angle and similarly for the wind direction accuracy. Nonetheless, we then show that the simultaneous use of the NRCS sampling scheme at several incidence angles can increase the wind retrieval accuracy, especially when three or four incidence angles are used. The obtained results can be used to enhance airborne scatterometers and multimode radars operated in a scatterometer mode, including airborne high-altitude conical scanning radars, and can be applied to new remote sensing systems' development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the spherical particle model and ten nonspherical particle models describing the scattering properties of snow are evaluated for potential use in precipitation estimation from spaceborne dual-frequency precipitation radar. The single scattering properties of nonspherical snow particles are computed using discrete dipole approximation (DDA), while those of spherical particles are determined using Mie theory. The precipitation profiles from WRF output are then input to a forward radiative transfer model to simulate the radar reflectivity at Ka-band and Ku-band. The results are validated with Global Precipitation Mission Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar measurements. Greater consistency between the simulated and observed reflectivity is obtained when using the sector- and dendrite-shape assumptions. For the case in this study, when using the spherical-shape assumption, radar underestimates the error of the cloud's top by about 300 m and underestimates the error of the cloud's area by about 15%. As snowflake shapes change with temperature, we use the range between −40 °C and −5 °C to define three temperature layers. The relationships between reflectivity (Z) and precipitation rate (R) are fitted separately for the three layers, resulting in  Z = 134.59 · R 1.184  (sector) and  Z = 127.35 · R 1.221  (dendrite) below −40 °C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar echo extrapolation is a commonly used approach for convective nowcasting. The evolution of convective systems over a very short term can be foreseen according to the extrapolated reflectivity images. Recently, deep neural networks have been widely applied to radar echo extrapolation and have achieved better forecasting performance than traditional approaches. However, it is difficult for existing methods to combine predictive flexibility with the ability to capture temporal dependencies at the same time. To leverage the advantages of the previous networks while avoiding the mentioned limitations, a 3D-UNet-LSTM model, which has an extractor-forecaster architecture, is proposed in this paper. The extractor adopts 3D-UNet to extract comprehensive spatiotemporal features from the input radar images. In the forecaster, a newly designed Seq2Seq network exploits the extracted features and uses different convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) layers to iteratively generate hidden states for different future timestamps. Finally, the hidden states are transformed into predicted radar images through a convolutional layer. We conduct 0–1 h convective nowcasting experiments on the public MeteoNet dataset. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the 3D-UNet extractor, the newly designed forecaster, and their combination. In addition, case studies qualitatively demonstrate that the proposed model has a better spatiotemporal modeling ability for the complex nonlinear processes of convective echoes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent upgrades to China's radar network now allow for polarimetric measurements of convective systems in central China, providing an effective data set with which to evaluate the microphysics schemes employed in local squall line simulations. We compared polarimetric radar variables derived by Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and radar forward models and the corresponding hydrometeor species with radar observations and retrievals for a severe squall line observed over central China on 16 March 2022. Two microphysics schemes were tested and were able to accurately depict the contrast between convective and stratiform regions in terms of the drop size distribution (DSD) and reproduce the classical polarimetric signatures of the observed differential reflectivity (ZDR) and specific differential phase (KDP) columns. However, for the convective region, the simulated DSDs in both schemes exhibited lower proportions of large drops and lower liquid water content; by contrast, for the stratiform region, the proportion of large drops was found to be too high in the Morrison (MORR) scheme. The underprediction of ice-phase processes in the convective region, particularly the riming processes associated with graupel and hail, was likely responsible for the bias toward large raindrops at low levels. In the stratiform region, raindrop evaporation in the WRF Double-Moment 6-Class (WDM6) scheme, which partially offsets the overestimation of ice-phase processes, produced ground DSDs that more closely matched the observational data, and did not exhibit the overly strong warm-rain collisional growth processes of MORR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Echus-Kasei region on Mars has been exposed to different episodic volcanic, fluvial, and glacial events in Amazonian time. The goal of the present work is to demonstrate the usefulness of radar instruments to find preserved late Amazonian subsurface structures that may have been encapsulated underneath recent lava flows on Mars. We have analysed 27 radar observations of the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), over the region of Echus Chasma. We discovered the presence of subsurface reflectors in five consecutive SHARAD radargrams at a depth from 35 to 79 m beneath the structure of a lava fan that formed about 59 ± 4 Ma ago. Some vents are preserved above the surface of this lava flow, which stands at a height of 80 m above the surrounding surface. A few kilometres to the north, we find other subsurface reflectors at a depth of about 30 m and a long pit chain formed by the collapse of a lava tube. These kinds of subsurface late Amazonian structures are of interest for astrobiology because they date from the last period when the planet still experienced intense volcanic activity over regions that were previously extensively covered by water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]