Spectral moment estimation for weather radars using a whitening transformation on oversampled data

A method for estimation of Doppler spectral moments on pulsed weather radars is presented. This scheme operates on oversampled echoes in range; that is samples of in-phase and quadrature phase components are taken at a rate several times larger than the reciprocal of the transmitted pulse length. The aforementioned radar variables are estimated by suitably combining weighted averages of these oversampled signals in range with the usual processing of samples (spaced at pulse repetition time) at a fixed range location. The weights in range are chosen such that the oversampled signals become uncorrelated and consequently the variance of the estimates decreases significantly. Because the estimates´ errors are inversely proportional to the volume scanning times, it follows that storms can be surveyed much faster than it is possible with current processing methods, or equivalently, for the current volume scanning time, the accuracy of the estimates can be greatly improved