THE ACCURACY OF DETERMINATION OF RADAR SHADOWS CREATED BY USING GIS TECHNIQUES FOR THE NEEDS OF THE SPATIAL PLANNING OF RADAR SENSORS ON INLAND WATERWAYS INTRODUCTION

摘要

Inland waters are often difficult cases during designing system of observational sensors like radars and CCTV cameras. This situation is caused by irregular shape of river section and occurrence of obstacles, which just limits fields of observations. One of the main targets during designing the net of sensors is to minimize their number and maximize their area of observation. This task requires certain advanced method of spatial planning, which take into account the spatial factors mentioned above. In earlier work for that purpose were used GIS techniques. They allow planning observational sensors by using 3D model of aquatory or by performing raster-based viewshed analyses (Lubczonek 2007). It was also noted that standard form of viewshed analysis could not be perfect for radar sensors. The reason was the basic radar distortions depended mainly on the beam characteristic, which can decrease observation area (Lubczonek 2008). Thus, the further step was to implement the basic radar distortions for viewshed analysis, which overall improve process of spatial planning of radar sensors. This paper presents the final step of this research, which is verification of proposed method in the aspect of radar shadows determination. This scientific work was financed from Polish funds for science in 2010-2012 as a research project.