Notes and Correspondence Beam traces and coverage of weather radars in mountainous regions

摘要

The radar beam propagation model used by Bech et al. (2007) does not correspond to the description in the paper, but was made for testing out different alternatives in three-dimensional use of my two-dimensional numerical solution of the atmospheric model described in the paper. The three-dimensional model used in the paper is not able to spread effects of topographic blockages if the derivative of refractivity with respect to height, dN/dz (called VRG in the paper), is different from that of a standard atmosphere. In the cases discussed in the paper it will produce triangular-shaped regions with very sharply increasing beam height or no value. Examples of plots with such defects are shown in Figs. 5 and 8 in Bech et al. (2007) and in Figure 1 below.