Limitations and Artifacts
Radar data interpretation depends on many hypotheses about the atmosphere and the weather targets, including:
- International Standard Atmosphere.
- Targets small enough to obey the Rayleigh scattering, resulting in the return being proportional to the precipitation rate.
- The volume scanned by the beam is full of meteorological targets (rain, snow, etc..), all of the same variety and in a uniform concentration.
- No attenuation
- No amplification
- Return from side lobes of the beam are negligible.
- The beam is close to a Gaussian function curve with power decreasing to half at half the width.
- The outgoing and returning waves are similarly polarized.
- There is no return from multiple reflections.
These assumptions are not always met; one must be able to differentiate between reliable and dubious echoes.
Read more about this topic: Weather Radars
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