Clutter Mitigation for Weather Radars

Project Leader: Prof. Douglas Gray
Project Team: Si Tran Nguyen Nguyen, Ruiting Yang, Marian Viola

Funding: Commonwealth of Australia - Bureau of Meteorology

Project background

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology operates an extensive network of weather radars and for low elevation scans unwanted clutter returns from buildings, birds, vegetation and the sea surface often cause problems in the estimation of precipitation parameters. Whilst a number of techniques, such as Doppler processing can be used to mitigate the deleterious effects of unwanted clutter the problem of differentiating precipitation moving radially to the radar from ground clutter remains an outstanding issue.

Project aims

This study is to investigate through theoretical analysis, computer simulation and by application to real data, algorithms that can mitigate the effect of the unwanted clutter on typical weather radars. Techniques such as the CPA (coherent phase alignment) algorithm, wavelet analysis and texture characterisation will be investigated and compared.