Weather radars with pulse compression using complementary codes: simulation and evaluation

Using complementary codes in conjunction with wideband pulse compression waveforms can yield high resolution spatial and temporal weather measurements with low range sidelobe contamination. For extended targets such as precipitation systems, range sidelobes mask and corrupt observations of weak phenomena occurring near areas of strong echoes. Therefore, having low range sidelobes is extremely important in precisely determining the echo scattering region. In this paper, the authors evaluate the performance of complementary phase codes in the context of time-varying, distributed weather targets. A simulation procedure has been developed to describe the signal returns from distributed targets using phase-coded pulse compression transmit waveforms with complementary coding for both single and dual polarization operations. The evaluation is based on the integrated sidelobe level and Doppler sensitivity after matched filter processing.