Possibility of High Power Gyrotrons for Super Range Resolution Radar and Atmospheric Sensing.

摘要

High power gyrotrons have been developed recently; this makes a number of high power millimeter was oscillators available. Currently their main application is the heating of fusion plasmas. This examines other potential applications for these rf sources. If used in multipulse radar mode, the pulses may be somewhat different from each other and this must be considered. A variant of coherent on receive can be used. With this, the entire pulse, not only the phase, is renormalized to a reference pulse. The data are analyzed off line. Possible applications of the Quasi-optical gyrotron in a radar mode include exploiting its wide tuning range to achieve super range resolution and also remotely sensing the distribution of the size of ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Possible applications of a fixed frequency (94 GHz) gyrotron in radar mode include studying the structure of clouds. In a forward scatter mode, these high power sources could provide the capability to remotely sense the structure of clear air turbulence. The tunability of the quasi-optical gyrotron could also be exploited to rapidly perform measurements of relative humidity on the ground and in clouds, and to perform two-way earth to space measurements of upper atmosphere trace element concentrations.