Understanding tornadic debris echoes using a radar time-series emulator

A polarimetric radar time-series emulator that produces both meteorological and non-meteorological radar echoes was developed. There are two main constituents in the radar emulator: a set of quasi-randomly populated tracers to emulate meteorological echoes and another set of point scatterers to emulate individual tornadic debris objects. Based on previous work to emulate meteorological radar echoes, the concept was expanded to the new framework. Two key innovations of the framework are the physically consistent trajectories of individual debris objects and realistic polarimetric radar cross section modeling of the debris targets.