A statistical comparison of horizontal winds obtained by a variety of spaced antenna techniques using the Jicamarca VHF radar

Abstract

We have used the Jicamarca radar system to measure horizontal winds by a variety of time domain and frequency domain spaced antenna techniques. Horizontal wind comparisons for two orthogonal components are carried out in a statistical sense, i.e., using correlation coefficients, mean differences, standard deviation of differences, and percentage of failures. We find that a simple technique that assumes horizontally isotropic scattering compares very closely with the more complicated full correlation analysis techniques. Techniques that attempt to correct for turbulence appear to be very sensitive to the way we estimate the width of the cross‐correlation/spectra functions. This is particularly true above 15 km, where discrepancies in the wind speed are apparent. In general, all techniques give essentially the same wind direction.