Lecturer: Joel Arnault Date: 2006-09-21 10:00 Place: Aniara
Imaging of atmospheric waves and fine scale structure using radar interferometry
Final degree project for the French High School: SUPAERO, supervised by prof. Sheila Kirkwood at IRF
The atmospheric radar ESRAD located in Kiruna, Sweden (67.88°N, 21.10°E) receives some unexplained echoes as PMSE and PMWE. In the normal analysis procedure, only height profiles of the backscattered signal?s power are available. More precisely, such profiles give for each height the average of the signals backscattered by all the scatterers contained in the radar probed volume. Coherent Radar Imaging (CRI), a technique using radar interferometry, allows computing angular maps of the backscattered signal?s power, also called brightness maps. This tells how much scatterers are contained in each horizontal plan and where they are located, which is expected to help understanding the geophysics of the unexplained echoes.
CRI results have already been obtained in the PhD thesis of Prof. Yu, 2000, although it concerns only a small sample of ESRAD data.
This master project led to a computer program whose main function is to build 2D/3D movies with brightness angular maps obtained by CRI, on any ESRAD data. It has been shown that spectral information gives access to scatterers? locations, despite the really bad angular resolutions of Fourier?s and Capon?s methods. This spectral information is also used to provide scatterers? radial velocities.
First results on PMSE, PMWE and tropospheric clouds obtained with that computer program will finally be presented.
Created 2006-08-30 10:56:42 by Uwe Raffalski Last changed 2006-09-15 09:39:02 by Uwe Raffalski
