Coherent Subtraction of Short Pulsed Radio Frequency Interference: A Case Study

Interference from one radar system to another may compromise radar performance. For simple low-duty cycle pulsed sinusoidal interference, the interfering power is highly concentrated in the time domain (simplifying its detection) and occupies only a small fraction of a coherent integration period, making mitigation more feasible. While a flag-and-exclude approach can be applied to reduce the impact of this interference, such methods may impact downstream radar processing operations due to the absence of flagged data. If possible, it is more desirable to estimate and coherently subtract interference to reduce the impact on downstream operations. A case study of a coherent subtraction approach with data from NOAA's Advanced Technology Demonstrator (ATD) weather radar is presented in this paper that demonstrates reasonable performance and suggests avenues for continued advancement of the method.