Improvement of a standard Doppler dealiasing technique for weather radars operating in heavy clutter environment

Techniques devised to correct aliased Doppler velocity PPI maps obtained from meteorological radars seem to have not accounted for the possible presence of extended areas of ground clutter and/or practical absence of signal due to beam screening. This is a severe limit for radars operating in hilly terrain. Dealiasing methods are necessarily based on hypotheses of continuity of the radial velocity field, which are quite hard to exploit when such a field is corrupted by ground clutter, or even void of data over relatively waste areas. The authors discuss this topic, first showing some drawbacks that a classical dealiasing technique undergoes when utilized in such a context. Data utilized are those gathered by a dual polarization Doppler weather radar sited in Tuscany, in a quite orographically complex environment. After that, they describe a modified algorithm that overcomes the limitations of the original technique, and show that the proposed modifications are useful to make the algorithm work correctly even under severe clutter/beam screening conditions