Weather Radar Network Design

The Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) is investigating the use of dense networks of short-range radars for weather sensing. A first test-bed of this new paradigm is currently deployed in southwest Oklahoma. The potential benefits of closely deployed, overlapping, short-range weather radars are easy to see intuitively amounting to a greater ability to measure at lower beam heights (mitigating the effects of the Earth curvature), an increased spatial and temporal resolution in the measurements, and the capability of optimally and adaptively tasking the individual radars according to the meteorological scene. In this paper formulations for radar network design are provided, with various parameters such as number of radars with overlapping coverage, network coverage area, number of radars in a network, and number of elemental cells in a network, and applied to the design of a radar network based on system specifications such as detection sensitivity, beam size, minimum beam height, and overlapping coverage.