Engineering Commons^™

The Probability Distribution Of Nscat Measurements, Paul E. Johnson, David G. Long

Faculty Publications

NSCAT makes only indirect measurements of wind. The direct measurement is of the backscattered radar power. The signal power is contaminated by radiometric noise so a separate measurement of the noise power is subtracted from the signal-plus-noise measurement to estimate the backscattered power. Using the radar equation, sigma-0 is computed from the measured signal power. From multiple sigma-0 mesaurements made at different azimuth angles, the wind is estimated. In wind retrieval, the NSCAT sigma-0 measurements are assumed to have a Gaussian probability distribution with a variance which depends on the mean. Given this distribution model, the maximum-likelihood estimtor is formed …