Electronically steered phased array radar was developedin mid-1960s mainly for military applications. It hasthe capability of instantaneously and dynamically controllingbeam position on a pulse-to-pulse basis, whichallows a single radar to perform multiple functions suchas search, target tracking, and weapon controls. Therecent-installed phased array radar (PAR) at the NationalWeatherRadar Testbed (NWRT) in Norman, Oklahomais the first phased array system in the nation dedicatedto weather radar research and can electronicallysteer the beam in both azimuth and elevation. To fullyunleash the power of the PAR for adaptive weather sensing,scheduling multiple competitive tasks (i.e. surveillanceand storm cells tracking) in a sequence to meetthe requirement of the update time for each task is thecore of this study.Time Balance (TB) is an adaptive process that schedulescompeting tasks, by balancing the available radartime and the time demanded by each task. When tasksdemand more time than the time provided by the radar,the radar is in the so-called overload condition. In thiswork, simulated radar data are used to compare theperformance of TB-based scanning strategies. Severalmethods are proposed to mitigate the overload conditionand their performance is assessed and compared to thatof conventional Volume Coverage Pattern (VCP) usedin the operational Weather Surveillance Radar- 1988Doppler (WSR-88D).
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