Radar Science

About The Radar Science Group at JPL
The Radar Science Group helps provide the scientific motivations, data interpretation algorithms, applications, and science-driven design specifications for the radars developed by the Radar Science and Engineering Section at JPL. The group’s principal tasks include designing observation strategies using radars and justifying the radar instrument requirements to meet quantitative scientific goals, developing the physical and mathematical algorithms to reach these goals using the radar data that is collected, and carrying out scientific research (including analysis and prediction) using the data from these algorithms.

The group’s projects include analysis, researching, design, development, testing, and validation (including calibration) of radar processing algorithms and implementations for scatterometers, atmospheric profiling radars, cloud Doppler profilers, sounders, synthetic aperture radars, and radar interferometry observation strategies. The group also uses data from spaceborne radars and other complementary instruments (spaceborne, airborne, or ground-based) to characterize, understand, quantify the uncertainties in, and try to improve the predictability of a very broad range of atmospheric, surface, and solid Earth phenomena. These activities include modeling Earth system components, constraining the model parameters and boundary conditions, and assimilating radar and other data into the model forecasts, for analysis as well as prediction.