Technical and scientific aspects of MST Radar. Part 1

• Published in: Radio science 1997-03, Vol.32 (2), p.675-874
• Main Authors: Larsen, Miguel F, Franke, Steven J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0048-6604

The papers in this two-part special section deal with a number of issues of special concern to the MST community, namely, science objectives, technique development, signal processing, and application of new technology. Long data sets with observations of winds in the mesosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere are now becoming available from a variety of locations, giving a broader global coverage of winds, tides, gravity waves, and turbulence parameters in the middle atmosphere. The importance of such measurements for global circulation modeling is becoming increasingly clear, and the MST radars will undoubtedly continue to make important contributions in this area. Interferometric techniques have developed significantly in the last 5 years and have been used to develop new methods for estimating atmospheric flow parameters and for correcting and elucidating the biases that occur in conventional measurements. Signal processing and the development of robust estimators for extracting physical quantities from the measurements have been important topics since the first workshops. New spectral analysis techniques that have become available in the last few years appear to offer the potential for significant improvement in parameter estimation in MST measurements. Recent improvements and lower costs for electronics have made it possible to develop simple inexpensive systems with sophisticated capabilities such as the new Arecibo interferometer instrumentation.