High altitude compact solid state 95 GHz cloud radar

The study of high altitude clouds has motivated the development of new airborne and space-borne millimeter-wave cloud radars. Airborne millimeter-wave radars can offer better spatial resolution and sensitivity than ground-based counterparts, by avoiding water vapor attenuation in the lower atmosphere and spatial resolution degradation due to beam spreading. Furthermore, aircraft can cover large geographic areas and simulate satellite geometry. A next generation 95 GHz Compact Millimeter-wave radar (CMR) is currently under development. Incorporation of pulse compression will provide sensitivity comparable to larger klystron tube-based transmitters traditionally used in ground based 95 GHz radars. The CPU-bases signal processor will be replaced with a stand alone processor bases on re-configurable Field Programmable Gate Array Logic (FPGA). The new processor digitizes the IF signal, performs digital-in phase and quadrature phase detection, and applies the pulse-pair algorithm.