Modular Software Architecture for Advanced Weather Radars

The Modular Software Architecture for Advanced Weather Radars project seeks to develop a modular weather processing software architecture and software blocks, or modules, which can be applied to various commercial and military radar systems. This Phase I effort will identify processing algorithms that can be developed in software as these radar-independent processing blocks, and develop the overarching software architecture to utilize these modular processing blocks to develop a complete weather radar processing system in software. As part of the Phase I effort, a few sample algorithms, primarily standard weather radar processing functions such as pulse-pairs processing for velocity and reflectivity (Z) estimates, will be developed into modular software blocks. These blocks will then be demonstrated by processing data from an existing radar system with these software modules. These modules can be immediately applied to existing tactical radar systems and weather radars needing processor upgrades, or to adjunct weather processors such as the SPS-48 Weather Extractor Computer and the SPY-1 Tactical Environmental Processor.BENEFITS: The anticipated benefits of the Modular Software Architecture for Advanced Weather Radars include a low-cost software upgrade path for existing weather radars, as well as a low-cost solution for adding adjunct weather radar processing capability to ship-borne and land-based tactical radar systems. The use of modular software applications allows great portability and reuse of modules among various radar systems, which significantly lowers the cost of deploying multiple weather radar processors for different radars. By processing radar data completely in software running on standard COTS personal computers, the hardware costs (which can be very high for legacy radar systems due to the use of custom processor hardware) for these next-generation weather processors are extremely low.