Overlaping radar question...

[Robert Edmonds]

I was thinking today about the radial velocity measurements with doppler radar. For areas where there is overlapping radar coverage, instead of getting only radial velocity information, you could get true velocity motion. Has this ever been tried? For some place where certain angles are not right this would still not be feasible. Also, there would be difficulties since radars at different distances would be sampling different heights of the storm. However, it might be interesting to get the true motion, from radar.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I was thinking today about the radial velocity measurements with doppler radar. For areas where there is overlapping radar coverage, instead of getting only radial velocity information, you could get true velocity motion. Has this ever been tried? For some place where certain angles are not right this would still not be feasible. Also, there would be difficulties since radars at different distances would be sampling different heights of the storm. However, it might be interesting to get the true motion, from radar.

Hi Robert,

Yes - it's referred to as dual-Doppler. There are many examples of dual-Doppler analyses in the literature. I'm not particularly familiar with DD since I haven't used that 'technique' for data analysis, but it's objective is to do just what you said -- attempt to obtain the full wind from radial velocity data from two separated radars. In fact, dual-Doppler will be a major focus of many of the X-band mobile radars used in the upcoming VORTEX 2 field program.

 

[Robert Edmonds]

Thanks for the information. On a side note, what is the typical error in the radial velocity? Is it mainly instrumental, or can the environmental velocity broadening (I guess that's what you would call it) be more significant?

 

[Mike Smith]

True vertical velocity was obtained by the Norman and Cimarron NSSL 10cm Dopplers during the Union City, OK tornado of 1973