Radar for Monitoring Hurricanes From Geostationary Orbit

NASA Tech Briefs, May 2004

A document describes a scanning Doppler radar system to be placed in a geostationary orbit for monitoring the three-dimensional structures of hurricanes, cyclones, and severe storms in general. The system would operate at a frequency of 35 GHz. It would include a large deployable spherical antenna reflector, instead of conventional paraboloidal reflectors, that would allow the reflector to remain stationary while moving the antenna feed(s), and thus, create a set of scanning antenna beams without degradation of performance. The radar would have separate transmitting and receiving antenna feeds moving in spiral scans over an angular excursion of 4° from the boresight axis to providing one radar image per hour of a circular surface area of 5,300-km diameter. The system would utilize a real-time pulse-compression technique to obtain 300-m vertical resolution without sacrificing detection sensitivity and without need for a high-peak-power transmitter. An onboard data-processing subsystem would generate three-dimensional rainfall reflectivity and Doppler observations with 13-km horizontal resolution and line-of-sight Doppler velocity at a precision of 0.3 m/s.

This work was done by Eastwood Im, Stephen Durden, John Huang, Michael Lou, Eric Smith, and Yahya Rahmat-Samii of Caltech for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For further information, access the Technical Support Package (TSP) free online at www.techbriefs.com/tsp under the Electronics/Computers category.

NPO-40423