7 A . 6 HYBRID SCAN AND JOINT SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR A HIGH EFFICIENCY MPAR

It has been realized that it is difficult to meet all the MPAR mission requirements with just a single beam from each sector of the MPAR. Increasing the number of simultaneous beams would complicate the MPAR system and its operation, as well as increase the development cost. It is therefore important to find and then decide on an efficient scan strategy and corresponding signal processing for the MPAR design. This is feasible because weather measurements have different requirements for angular resolution and sensitivity at different elevations (Zrnic et al. 2015), and the MPAR will have flexibilities in choosing beamwidth, steering beam direction, and generating waveforms. These flexibilities are useful and should be (and can be) optimized by using a hybrid scan strategy and developing advanced signal processing algorithms.