The NCAR airborne 94-ghz cloud radar: Calibration and data processing

The 94-GHz airborne HIAPER Cloud Radar (HCR) has been deployed in three major field campaigns, sampling clouds over the Pacific between California and Hawaii (2015), over the cold waters of the Southern Ocean (2018), and characterizing tropical convection in the Western Caribbean and Pacific waters off Panama and Costa Rica (2019). An extensive set of quality assurance and quality control procedures were developed and applied to all collected data.

Engineering measurements yielded calibration characteristics for the antenna, reflector, and radome, which were applied during flight, to produce the radar moments in real-time. Temperature changes in the instrument during flight affect the receiver gains, leading to some bias. Post project, we estimate the temperature-induced gain errors and apply gain corrections to improve the quality of the data.