Radar Basics

Ground based Weather Radar

The European Commission sponsored „COST 75” project has developed an inventory of all weather stations during 1995 (so it should be noted that this is provided for illustrative purpose only and will be out of date). The Graphic depicts this station inventory. The stations shown are classed into three types:

• Conventional Weather Radars (non Doppler)
  A conventional weather radar can be defined as an early, non-Doppler weather radar system which uses earlier, less efficient clutter elimination processing (such as clutter map and statistics) than modern systems. Althought there are still several conventional weather radar systems in operation, these are no longer manufactured specifically.
• Doppler Weather Radars
  The Module has concentrated on the characteristics of Doppler Weather Radars (althought some principles are common to all primary systems). Their implementation is widespread througout the world.
• Polarimetric Doppler Weather radars
  Polarimetric Radars are Doppler weather radars with additional processing functionality to allow them to further compute more advanced profiles based on the directionaly of the reflected electromagnetic energy received.

Conventional, doppler and polarimetric weather radars are all operational systems and they operate in C-Band, S-Band or X-Band.