A radical breakthrough in radar technology

Before MultiScan, pilots had to manually manipulate gain, tilt and range in an attempt to separate ground returns from actual weather. This required that pilots have a great deal of skill operating the radar, deciphering what they were seeing, and developing an accurate understanding of the weather situation.

With MultiScan Ground Clutter Suppression, the entire process is automatic and completely transparent, allowing flight crews to concentrate on weather avoidance, rather than radar manipulation and display interpretation.

These images show a radar screen without ground clutter suppression (left) and with ground clutter suppression (right).

The patented MultiScan Ground Clutter Suppression is able to distinguish between weather and ground returns, thus allowing the radar to be aimed at the lower, most reflective portion of a thunderstorm. Through the use of sophisticated signal processing, it is possible to separate out the ground returns and display only weather to the pilots. This overcomes one of the greatest challenges in learning and operating manual weather radar - distinguishing real weather threats from ground clutter.

The difficulty is due in part to the fact that the most reflective part of a thunderstorm is located in the bottom portion of the storm. Since highly reflective targets, such as ground and cities, reflect a greater portion of the energy back to the radar antenna, the edge of the beam must be above the ground in order to avoid them. This causes the center of the beam, the part used for weather detection, to be well above the reflective part of the thunderstorms

In this video, you can see a side-by-side comparison of weather radars with and without ground clutter suppression.