Optimum Detection for a Class of Stationary Meteorological Radars

Recently, an innovative low-cost approach for the construction of meteorological radars has been introduced by exploiting the correlation between the received signals from two fixed wide-beam antennas. Yet, it was then found that a very large amount of signal samples would be required to ensure a satisfactory performance of the proposed radar. On the other hand, it was also envisaged that such a problem could be circumvented by the use of more than two antennas. This work is a first step in this direction, extending the original radar proposal from two to an arbitrary number of antennas. In addition to designing an optimum detector for the new radar, we assess its performance by deriving asymptotic, closed-form expressions for the resulting detection and false-alarm probabilities. As a term of comparison, we also design and analyze a suboptimal detection scheme based on the traditional phased-array approach. Numerical examples are given to validate the provided analysis and to illustrate the performance agin achieved from the use of additional antennas.