<title>Rain radar system studies and hardware developments</title>

Abstract

A rain radar system study carried out for the European Space Agency was completed in early 1992. It lead to the definition and comparison of two ambitious rain radar instruments providing higher accuracy in retrieving the rain rate profile: (1) a dual- frequency radar, operating simultaneously at 24 and 35 GHz, (2) a dual-beam radar, operating at 24 GHz and achieving a stereoscopic observation of the rain cells through two antenna beams (one forward, one aft). At last, ALCATEL ESPACE just won an ESA contract concerning the development of the critical subsystems of the radar instrument, in order to demonstrate their feasibility. In this project, an all digital pulse compression chain will be designed and manufactured. This paper presents the instrument configurations which were defined in the course of all ALCATEL ESPACE rain radar studies, as well as preliminary results concerning the digital pulse compression breadboard.