Robust Velocity Dealiasing for Weather Radar Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Doppler weather radar is an essential tool for monitoring and warning of hazardous weather phenomena. A large aliasing range (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>r</mi><mi ma...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hyeri Kim, Boonleng Cheong
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-01-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/3/802
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Summary:Doppler weather radar is an essential tool for monitoring and warning of hazardous weather phenomena. A large aliasing range (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>r</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">a</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula>) is important for surveillance but a high aliasing velocity (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>v</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">a</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula>) is also important to obtain storm dynamics unambiguously. However, the <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>r</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">a</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>v</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">a</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> are inversely related to pulse repetition time. This “Doppler dilemma” is more challenging at shorter wavelengths. The proposed algorithm employs a CNN (convolutional neural network), which is widely used in image classification, to tackle the velocity dealiasing issue. Velocity aliasing can be converted to a classification problem. The velocity field and aliased count can be regarded as the input image and the label, respectively. Through a fit-and-adjust process, the best weights and the biases of the model are determined to minimize a cost function. The proposed method is compared against the traditional region-based method. Both methods show similar performance on mostly filled precipitation. For sparsely filled precipitation; however, the CNN demonstrated better performance since the CNN processes the entire scan at once while the region-based method processes only the limited adjacent area.
ISSN:2072-4292