Weather Radars - Limitations and Artifacts

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.