Radartype

Radartype is a term used in radar technology and related data processing to denote a category or class assigned to a radar signal, return, or data record. It is not a standardized specification, but rather a label used in various systems to aid interpretation, processing, and display of radar information.

In practice, radartype may indicate the origin or nature of the return: weather echoes such as precipitation versus non-precipitating clouds, ground clutter, aircraft, or ocean surface. It can also serve as a metadata tag within a data set to distinguish different kinds of data elements or processing stages. In software implementations, radartype can be an enumerated field or attribute within a data structure describing a particular radar sample or feature.

Examples of usage vary by domain. Meteorological radars might assign radartype values like precipitation, clear-air, or clutter to guide filtering and visualization. Air-surveillance or marine radars may differentiate radar returns as airborne targets, maritime targets, or surface clutter to support tracking and display logic.

Standards for radartype are not universal. Many systems use vendor- or project-specific values, which may be mapped to common concepts in open data formats such as NetCDF or HDF5. Because of this variability, radartype definitions are typically documented within the specific radar system or data format you are working with.

See also: radar data formats, radar signal processing, target classification, clutter filtering.