Poly-pulse pair estimation in a Doppler weather radar

Accurate wind speed profile measurements are needed in a weather radar to provide reliable information of rapidly changing weather conditions. The commonly used pulse pair method calculates the first two moments of the Doppler spectrum from estimates of the complex autocorrelation function. Unbiasedness of pulse pair estimates is based on the assumption that a spectrum is symmetric or very narrow. However, it was shown in Lee (1999) that these bias errors can be very serious since the weather spectrum is often broad and not symmetric. Therefore, the poly-pulse pair method is analyzed in this paper to reduce these bias errors using a skewed Gaussian spectrum model with various spectrum widths.