Mapping of Weather Radar Ground Clutter Using the Digital Elevation Model (srtm)

This paper focuses on ground clutter mapping for weather radars. To achieve this, we extracted the Digital Terrain Model (DTM) using the Radio Mobile software. We considered in this study three different weather radar sites namely, Setif (Algeria), Bordeaux (France) and Dakar (Senegal). The error observed between the simulated clutter surface by the Mobile Radio software and the one obtained in clear weather by our approach is 5.5% for Setif, between 7.2% and 10.2% for Bordeaux and Dakar. To improve the results and due to the atmosphere inhomogeneity, we developed an algorithm based on the calculation of the curvature of the earth and considering a standard atmosphere. It is noticed that the proposed new approach, leads to 0.7% reduction in the error for the site of Setif, 3.7% for Bordeaux and 8% for Dakar.