Universal fluctuations in tropospheric radar measurements

¹  Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, University of Florence - via Santa Marta 3, 50139, Florence, Italy, EU
²  Dipartimento di Energetica “S. Stecco”, University of Florence and INFN - via Santa Marta 3, 50139, Florence, Italy, EU
³  Department of Information Engineering and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Siena via Tommaso Pendola 37, 53100 Siena, Italy, EU
⁴  Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi ISC-CNR - via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy, EU

Corresponding author: andrea.barucci@unifi.it

Received: 27 October 2009
Accepted: 8 January 2010

Abstract

Radar data collected at an experimental facility arranged on purpose suggest that the footprint of atmospheric turbulence might be encoded in the radar signal statistics. Radar data probability distributions are calculated and nicely fitted by a one-parameter family of generalized Gumbel (GG) distributions, G_a. A relation between the wind strength and the measured shape parameter a is obtained. Strong wind fluctuations return pronounced asymmetric leptokurtic profiles, while Gaussian profiles are eventually recovered as the wind fluctuations decrease. Besides stressing the crucial impact of air turbulence for radar applications, we also confirm the adequacy of G_a statistics for highly correlated complex systems.