WEATHER RADAR APPARATUS AND RAINFALL RATE CALCULATION METHOD

• Main Authors: WADA MASAKAZU, MIZUTANI FUMIHIKO
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 27.01.2011
• Subjects: ANALOGOUS ARRANGEMENTS USING OTHER WAVES; DETERMINING DISTANCE OR VELOCITY BY USE OF RADIO WAVES; GENERAL TAGGING OF CROSS-SECTIONAL TECHNOLOGIES SPANNING OVER SEVERAL SECTIONS OF THE IPC; GENERAL TAGGING OF NEW TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS; LOCATING OR PRESENCE-DETECTING BY USE OF THE REFLECTION ORRERADIATION OF RADIO WAVES; MEASURING; PHYSICS; RADIO DIRECTION-FINDING; RADIO NAVIGATION; TECHNICAL SUBJECTS COVERED BY FORMER USPC CROSS-REFERENCE ART COLLECTIONS [XRACs] AND DIGESTS; TECHNOLOGIES FOR ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE; TECHNOLOGIES OR APPLICATIONS FOR MITIGATION OR ADAPTATION AGAINSTCLIMATE CHANGE; TESTING

According to one embodiment, a weather radar apparatus includes a transmitting/receiving unit configured to simultaneously transmit radar waves of a horizontally polarized wave and a vertically polarized wave and receive reflected waves, a signal processing unit configured to perform dual polarization observation based on a reception output from the transmitting/receiving unit and calculate a received power of each polarized wave, an observation parameter calculation unit configured to calculate, based on the received powers, a first observation parameter having a first spatial resolution, and a second observation parameter having higher correlation with a rainfall rate than that of the first observation parameter and a second spatial resolution lower than the first spatial resolution, and a rainfall rate calculation unit configured to synthetically determine the rainfall rate based on the first observation parameter and the second observation parameter.