Rain Clutter Filtering from Radar Data with Slope Based Filter

One type of volume clutters is rain clutter that is caused by rain droplets. Moving weather systems will have a nonzero Doppler response the rate at which the rain droplets approach to the radar system. The complete data radar collects contain the returns of both the target and the clutter. The signal processing block in a radar system uses filtering operations to extract the target information while suppressing the clutter. Typically the filters are designed based on Doppler frequency using a Fourier filter bank. In this paper, we study the slope based filtering algorithm, and present some results obtained using that filter. Our experiment is indicating two interesting results. Firstly, the slope based filtering algorithm filter rain clutter at least as well as the Fourier filter bank. Secondly, the slope based filter performed better than the Fourier filter bank in the case of the generated Gaussian white noise. The experiments were performed in MATLAB environment and the data was real radar rain clutter data from Finnish Air Force medium range air surveillance radar (low PRF). Fifty different rain and snow situations have been recorded into data