Comparison of wind estimation errors for the spaced antenna technique: A case study for the MU radar

摘要

In this paper we estimate the random errors in the spaced antenna (SA) winds by two techniques and compare them with measurements made by the Doppler technique. With a one spatial dimension computer simulation, we apply typical parameters for the middle and upper atmosphere (MU) radar without noise. Briggs' [1984] full correlation analysis (FCA) is commonly applied to the SA technique, while Doviak et al. [1996] and Holloway et al. [1997] used another simple analytic form based on scattering theory to derive generalized expressions. This simple analytic form should have equivalent results to the Briggs FCA for the horizontal wind estimation. With our simulation results, this form generally shows similar results to the FCA, and sometimes shows better performance than the FCA although it needs simpler calculation than the FCA. The estimation error of this simple analytic form is better than that of the Doppler for large wind, and better than that of the FCA for small antenna spacing. MU radar observations are compared with these two analyses for the SA technique, and the simple analytic form also shows similar performance to the FCA.