Performance of a Discrete Spectral Peak Frequency Estimator for Doppler Wind Velocity Measurements

A frequency estimator formed from the peak of a discrete power spectrum is examined. Expressions to compute the performance of the estimator as a function of input signal bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio are developed and used to study the estimator´s capability to measure signal mean frequencies for remote Doppler measurement of atmospheric winds. Performance comparisons with the widely used complex-covariance estimator, based on simulations, show that frequency estimates formed from the spectral peak tend to have larger variance, except in the case of narrow-band input signals where the estimate standard deviation approaches that of the complex-covariance estimator.