My research at LATMOS focuses on radar signal processing and interpretation, with meteorological and geophysical applications. I am a permanent member of the laboratory's Atmospheric Science department since 2024.
I am a member of the ROXI science team since 2024.
Radars are commonly used in meteorology for the sounding of clouds and precipitations. From the targets' reflectivity and Doppler velocity measurements, we can indeed estimate the distribution of droplets / ice crystals in the sampled volume, from which we can try to invert the precipitation rates, terminal velocity, water/ice content, etc.
ROXI is a X-band vertically-pointing Doppler radar designed at LATMOS, for the study of the microphysical properties of precipitation from 0 to 13 km of altitude. The Doppler spectrograms generated by ROXI can be used to detect and classify hydrometeors for 128 gates of altitudes. My work consists in the development of processing / interpretation tools for the ROXI spectrograms.
ROXI website: roxi.projet.latmos.ipsl.fr
I was a member of the WISDOM science team from 2017 to 2024.
Ground Penetrating Radars unlocked a 3rd dimension in the study of the Red Planet. Such instruments can unveil the structure and provide clues on the composition of the subsurface with various ranges and resolutions, either from the orbit or directly on the surface with rovers.
WISDOM is the wideband GPR instrument of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission (ESA). Designed to sound the Martian subsurface down to 3-10 m with a resolution of a few cm, it will guide the rover drilling operations, and provide a geological context for the samples to be collected. My work consisted in the implementation of processing / interpretation tools for the WISDOM radargrams.
WISDOM website: www.wisdom-radar.eu
I released the PyBWE software in 2024.
Range resolution enhancement is one of the main challenges in radar signal processing. Range resolution being limited by the frequency bandwidth of theinstrument: the larger the bandwidth, the more enhancedthe resolution. FFT techniques are efficient and robust for spectral estimation, but their performances in resolution are limited by the inverse of the bandwidth, and the necessary application of windowing to reduce the impact of side-lobes. For this reason, Banwdith Extrapolation techniques (BWE) have been introduced by Cuomo et al. in 1993, and extensively used since.
PyBWE is the very first open-source Python implementation of BWE techniques, with documentation, tutorials, examples and tests. An article on PyBWE has been published in the Journal of Open-Source Software.
PyBWE website: nicoudart.github.io/PyBWE
Doppler spectrogram - ROXI - LATMOS