Wuhan Atmosphere Radio Exploration (WARE) radar: System design and online winds measurements

摘要

The basic configuration of the Wuhan MST (mesosphere-stratosphere-troposphere) radar, which was designed and constructed by the School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, is preliminarily described in this paper. The Wuhan MST radar operates at very high frequency (VHF) band (53.8 MHz) by observing the real-time characteristics of turbulence and the wind field vector in the height range of 3.5-90 km (not including 25-60 km) with high temporal and height resolutions. This all-solid-state, all-coherent pulse Doppler radar is China's first independent development of an MST radar focusing on atmospheric observation. The subsystems of the Wuhan MST radar include an antenna system, a feeder line system, all-solid-state radar transmitters, digital receivers, a beam control system, a signal processing system, a data processing system, a product generation system, and a user terminal. Advanced radar technologies are used, including highly reliable all-solid-state transmitters, low-noise large dynamic range digital receivers, an active phased array, high-speed digital signal processing, and real-time graphic terminals. This paper describes the design and implementation of the radar. Preliminary online wind measurements and results of the comparison to simultaneous observations by a GPS rawinsonde are presented as well.