Reconfigurable Weather Radar for Airborne Applications

Intelligent Automation, Inc (IAI) and its university partner, University of Oklahoma (OU), Norman, propose a forward-looking airborne environment sensor based on active weather radar technologies. The sensor consists of a software-defined radar transceiver, compact dual-polarized array antenna operating in the X-band as well as an integrated RF analog front-end. By leveraging dual-polarization processing, the system will be able to extract atmospheric parameters; thus it will be able to identify and classify the atmospheric conditions as well as local obscurants. The software defined radar transceiver has a Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) component which can easily generate high bandwidth chirp waveforms (bandwidth >=200 MHz) and pulse shaping can be defined digitally to reduce the side-lobes considerably. IAI is currently developing a software defined radar (SDR) platform that can adaptively switch between different modes of operation for radar, by modifying both transmit waveforms and receive signal-processing tasks on the fly. The proposed multi-channel radar technique and the system design will leverage IAI's vast experience in SDR, RF hardware design and antenna design and OU's capabilities in microwave design and field-proven atmospheric hazard modeling and detection algorithm development.