EOL Seminar – David Schvartzman: Advanced Capabilities and Atmospheric Science Applications

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Seminar Series Webpage:
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Title: Advanced Capabilities and Atmospheric Science Applications of the Fully Digital Horus Phased Array Radar

Abstract: Temporal and spatial sampling of mechanically scanning weather radars is insufficient to capture the four-dimensional evolution of atmospheric dynamics and microphysics. This is especially true for severe thunderstorms and other rapidly evolving, deep convective precipitation systems. Because of the confluence of previous development projects, technological readiness and reasonable cost, scientific need, and opportunity created by the eventual replacement of parabolic-reflector-based radars, now is the time to strongly consider Phased Array Radars (PARs) for atmospheric remote sensing. To meet the desired update times and polarimetric quality, it is expected that a highly reconfigurable fully digital phased array architecture will be necessary. Key PAR capabilities that support the needs of advanced weather surveillance include: the ability to almost instantly steer the radar beam to an arbitrary direction within the scan sector (i.e., beam agility), the flexibility to dynamically redefine the sampling parameters for each beam position in the scan, and the ability to digitally form multiple simultaneous beams in different directions. The Advanced Radar Research Center (ARRC) at the University of Oklahoma (OU) has developed a digital-at-every-element, S-band, dual-polarization phased array radar named “Horus”. With an aperture of approximately 2 m × 2 m (3° beamwidth), the mobile Horus radar has 1600 (40×40) dual-polarization channels and is extremely flexible in terms of array segmentation, channel-independent waveforms, adaptive beamforming, and can produce full volumetric scans in 10 s exploiting radar imaging methods. This talk will present capabilities of the Horus fully digital phased array radar, along with advanced scanning techniques, beam pattern synthesis, and polarimetric radar calibration methods. Results from recent field experiments, along with an evaluation of the Horus polarimetric data quality will be presented.