Detection of rain areas with airborne radar

Abstract

This paper deals with a method of detecting strong rain areas as well as regions with light rain when using airborne radar. Especially thunderstorm cells in a light rain environment are intended to be recognized. Although this type of radar is no highly sophisticated weather radar, it would be possible for such radar, slightly modified, to operate in a weather mode for detecting and classifying rain areas in the air. This would allow the pilot to avoid flying directly into a rain environment with, in certain circumstances, thunderstorm cells. The advantage of airborne radars operating as weather radars is the adequate frequency bandwidth, for example in X-band, which offers a good compromise between rain drop reflection coefficients and attenuation, i.e., the attenuation is not too large and the reflection coefficients are not too small.