Detection of Weather Signal in Ground Clutter for Airborne Weather Radar Based on Spatial Processing in Elevation

An efficient method to achieve weather signal detection (WSD) for airborne weather radar is to use the elevation information collected by vertical displayed multi-channel system. In this paper, we detect the weather signal component contaminated by complex Gaussian ground clutter over a so-called interferometric phase diagram (InPD) generated by dual-channel data. The value in each cell of the InPD, i.e., the interferometric phase, is employed as the test statistic for WSD. The statistics of the interferometric phase crossing elevation channels has been analyzed in detail. Based on the statistical characteristics, a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) detector is designed for WSD. As demonstrated by simulated and experimental results, the proposed algorithm overperforms most of the current WSD methods.