Performance Evaluation of a Doppler Radar System for Wind Shear Detection

Nonlinear stochastic differential equations are used to model wind shear, and extended Kalman filters are used to generate state estimates from measurements received from a Doppler radar on board an aircraft. Likelihood-ratio tests are then used to detect the presence of wind shear. In this paper, we evaluate how well the system performs by deriving theoretical expressions for the false alarm and miss error probabilities. The approach uses a Fokker-Planck equation. The overall methodology is general and should be of interest in other applications.