An Adaptation of the Barnes Filter Applied to the Objective Analysis of Radar Data

Spatial objective analysis is routinely performed in several applications that utilize radar data. Because of their relative simplicity and computational efficiency, one-pass distance-dependent-weighted-average (DDWA) schemes that utilize either the Cressman or the Barnes filter are often used in these applications. The DDWA schemes that have traditionally been used do not, however, directly account for two fundamental characteristics of radar data. These are: 1) the density of radar data is anisotropic (i.e. directionally-dependent) and 2) radar data density systematically decreases with increasing range. A DDWA scheme based on an adaptation of the Barnes filter is proposed. This scheme, termed the adaptive Barnes (A-B) scheme, explicitly takes into account the anisotropy and systematic trends of radar-data density. Theoretical investigations and observation system simulation experiments indicate that two attributes of the A-B scheme, direction-splitting and automatic adaptation to data density, may facilitate the preservation of the maximum amount of meaningful