No abstract

Doppler weather radar is an effective tool for monitoring mesoscale and small scale weather systems, quantitatively estimating precipitation and guarding against severe convective weather. The quality of the data obtained by Doppler weather radar will be seriously affected by the anomalous propagation of electromagnetic wave in tropospheric ducts. A novel method is introduced in this paper to retrieve the surface ducts, and it is based on the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method for modeling M profile and Parabolic Equation (PE) propagation model which is a well-established technique for efficiently solving the equations for beam propagation in an inhomogeneous atmosphere. The inversion echo powers and equivalent reflectivity factor are in accordance with the measured data, which indicates that the surface ducts can be effectively retrieved by this method.