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A research project exploring techniques for cleaning Dutch dual-polarisation weather radar polar volumes (pvols) so that biological signal — primarily birds — can be reliably extracted from data dominated by precipitation, electromagnetic (EM) interference and other artefacts.

This site collects the filtering experiments as a sequence of executable notebooks. The production filters distilled from these notebooks live in pipeline.R (full cleaning pipeline) and vispipeline.R (visualisation pipeline) in the project repository.

Notebooks

Chapter Topic
Banding Removing the dual-PRF banding artefact in lower-elevation scans using RHOHV and the depolarization ratio (DPR).
Simple rain segmentation A simple rain segmentation built on DPR, median-filter despeckling and a buffered area threshold via imager.
Rain stacking “Stacking” segmented rain across elevation scans into a single composite rain mask.
Rain visualisation Overlaying the rain mask on the bird-only RBC PPI for visual inspection.
EM Interference Detecting and interpolating EM interference beams using per-beam range coverage and linearity tests.

Data

Polar volumes are referenced as relative paths under data/. On the development machine that directory is a symlink to /mnt/clearskies/ (see .Rprofile). The raw HDF5 polar volumes are not part of the repository and the path is .gitignored.

Dependencies

  • R 3.6.3 with package versions pinned via renv (renv.lock).
  • Core analysis packages: bioRad, imager, raster, stars, sf, tidyverse, patchwork, pracma, mclust, ggnewscale.
  • Documentation built with bookdown using the bs4_book theme.

Restore the environment with renv::restore() and rebuild this site with bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd").