Amplitude Statistics of Weather Clutter Observed by L-band Radar

Abstract

We observed weather clutter from rain clouds using an L-band long-range air-route surveillance radar (ARSR) having a frequency 1.3 GHz, a beamwidth 1.2°, and a pulsewidth 3.0 μs. To determine the weather clutter amplitude, we introduce the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), which is more rigorous fit of the distribution to the data than the least squares method. It is discovered that the weather clutter amplitudes obey almost the Rayleigh distribution for entire data and the Weibull, log-Weibull, and K-distributions with the shape parameters of 1.73 to 2.43, 10.60, and 5.13 to 50.93, respectively, for data within the beam width of an antenna.